Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking Crappie Pond

Hi Guys. This is My first post on this site and was hoping Y'all could help Me out. I am a farmer and have access to an 40 year old impoundment that is about 5 to 6 surface acres. Average depth is 4 to 5 feet deep with the deepest water being around 8 feet at the dam. I am the only person who fishes this pond. The Pond has a large population of LMB a small population of Pumpkinseed and also a few large Flier.

The LMB are on average about 10 inches but throwing the right top water lures have brought me in several close to 3 pounds. The pumpkinseed are pretty small on average as I have only been able to catch a handful of keepers over the years. The flier are small in numbers but average about 10 inches long and would love to see more of them.

The pond has a lot of Lilly pads and from middle way to the back of the pond is full of standing timber, rotted at the surface from 1 to 3 inches in diameter. There are small branches off the main pond but not very long and mostly shallower water. There is plenty of spawning habitat for sure.

I placed about 50 Black crappie in this pond last year. I caught the first one this year and He was in full spawn (black as pitch). This is my favorite fish and would love to be able to cultivate some nice numbers of crappie while having a few slabs. I want to be able to catch some decent fish when i fish it without having to catch hundreds of dinks. The water is tannin stained also.

My main questions are, How many do I need to stock for this size pond? Do I need to seriously try to thin down the LMB? Any thoughts on the pumkinseed and flier? I would appreciate any diagnosis or advice that I can get. I will appreciate it and will be sure to keep all informed on the progress. Thanks. CF

Welcome to Pond Boss, Crappiefarmer.

I don't know what kind of fish a "flier" is.

There are a lot of options all depending on what your goals are.

Is crappie fishing what you want to accomplish the most?

Yes. Crappie are what I want as the target fishable species. Flier are in the sunfish family. usually average smaller sizes in the 7 to 8 inch range but larger ones will occur in the right conditions. Some people call them mill pond flies or fly perch. They are good eating also. I saw once where they co-existed with crappie well in a mill pond. I want a good crappie pond and would like to do away with as many LMB as possible unless they will benefit the crappie in some form. Thanks. CF

Welcome to PB. You should read the links on the archive Crappie thread.

http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92447#Post92447

There is a lot to read on the subject. You have IMO picked the most difficult type pond to have. The only ones who have had repeated success with a range of ponds are as follows. You could contact Jeff Slipke .

Here is the latest info from one of the threads.

Southeastern Pond Management reports in its client newsletter excellent success (so far) with Crappie in Southern ponds. This is the same company that one of our PB Convention speakers (Dr. Jeff Slipke) works for. He also provided the PB Forum through Dave Willis info on SMB in Southern ponds. The newsletter contains an article on that as well.

Back to the article on Crappie. With research from reservoirs on HSB feeding they found what we know that the HSB ate a lot of TShad. They also found that HSB eat a lot of young crappie. With that info they decided to try that application on some test ponds. They started with a clean pond and added TShad , GShiners and FH in the fall. The next spring they stocked BC fingerlings followed by HSB in the fall. Over the next 4 years they saw fast growth among the crappie with little crappie recruitment. No sign of the usual problems with crappie in ponds. They then created more ponds like the first and report that electrofishing results are very promising - slab crappie with no overpopulation and - yes the HSB are doing well. A pic of one of the HSB appears to be about 8 lbs. A pic of one of the crappie looks to be about 1.5 to 2 lbs.

Update - additional info on this idea -

North American Journal of Fisheries Management
Fish Community Response to Hybrid Striped Bass Introduction in Small Warmwater Impoundments
J. Wesley Neal*, Richard L. Noble, and James A. Rice


Results from this study suggest hybrid striped bass may have consumed enough small black crappies to prevent overpopulation without eliminating recruitment. However, further study is warranted using a larger number of ponds and differing conditions. If these results can be replicated, enhancing crappie fisheries while simultaneously creating a hybrid striped bass fisheries would be a favorable alternative to complete pond reclamation.

I appreciate the quick replies fellas. Thanks for the links Ewest. I will be reading for a while.

Question. do You think I would be wasting my time stocking fatheads in this pond now with the established fishery? Would I be just giving the predators a feast or would enough fatheads make it through to spawn and populate?CF

They would probably just be lunch.

Fliers are closely related to crappies, in many ways they look alike. They prefer soft acidic waters and will not do well or even survive in hard basic water. IME, fliers do not compete well with crappies so you may actually see fewer and fewer fliers if the crappies start to do well. Sort of like how SMB do not generally compete well with LMB.

HSB on the other hand prefer hard basic water. It is most like the sea water, where their one parent species the striped bass lives. HSB will most likely do poorly in a pond that is tannic, acidic and soft. However, HSB are not striped bass and you can always give them a try...

If large crappies are what you are shooting for, I would encourage you to allow your LMB population to remain high and stunted which means they're hungry as well. They may help keep the recruitment of your YOY crappie down and allow you to grow some nice sized crappies.

CJ's suggestion of not keeping LMB is a very good one. If you start keeping significant numbers of bass, you're likely to end up with thousands upon thousands of crappie about 3-4" long and thin enough you can see through them. Predators will be essential to making a lake that size work with crappies.

This is the first time I have ever heard of a flier. The largest crappie I have ever seen have all come from ponds similar to what Walt is describing. Ponds that have heavy bass populations that the bass are stunted in size. I helped drain a pond once that was full of giant crappie with no small crappie and lots of stunted bass.

You may want to test the pH of your pond... Once we know the pH, we can give you species that are better suited for your pond. If it is too acidic, FHM may not survive. Adirondack pond another forum member has that issue in his pond as his is very acidic. GSH will survive though, as will some other non conventional forage species like mudminnows or lake chubsuckers.

You would also possibly get some bigger bass by having GSH.

I have put in 50 crappie. Smallest being 6 inches and the largest being 14 inches. Most are in the 10 to 11 inch range. With this being a 5 acre pond, is that enough or do I need to stock many more? I saw on one post that I would need to stock 100 per surface acre but this seemed to be a fresh pond. I am catching these fish myself and doing it the cheap way. The area that I am catching the crappie from has yielded healthy fish with little in the way of lesions or any signs of disease. So I feel confident that disease would not be an issue. I just need an idea of how many i need to put into the pond with the LMB population and have some recruitment. Thanks. CF

When did you first start stocking crappie?

I can tell you that as a kid, I put 9 crappie into a 4 acre neighborhood pond that had bass and BG in it already. 9 crappie was more than enough! That pond is polluted with crappie 15 years later... With you having stocked some larger adults, I think 50 is more than enough.

As CJ asks, knowing when you stocked the crappies, or at least the first few adults, would shed a little more light.

But really, the difficulty here is not being able to predict the spawns of crappie in general. So it's even harder to speculate how your crappie would have performed over their history in your pond.

I think that your best goal is to collect as much info. as you can about the existing total population of fish that you have now. Unfortunately, I believe one of the best times to get info. on crappie populations is early spring when they're all schooled up around submerged structurel, so that would be some time off.

You may want to look into having a fisheries biologist come out to your pond and do an assessment, particularly a shock boat that can sample your pond. If crappie management if your goal, as Sunil pointed out, early spring would be the best time to do that. That is when crappie are shallow and most vulnerable to being shocked up. Other times of year, they tend to be deeper and less susceptible to shocking. We see that regularly on here, where pondmeisters have their pond shocked up in the summer and then drain it or kill it off and all these crappies show up when there were few to none in the actual electroshock survey. Certain circumstances, fyke nets are also very efficient way to assess your pond's crappie population among other fish species as well.

I stocked these crappie in the winter and summer of last year. I was hoping to get 50 in before this past spring for a good spawn. Anyone have any idea how long it could be before I would be able to catch the young ones on hook and line? Just looking for a rough guess so I have some idea of really starting to target them hard. Once smaller fish are being caught, (proof of a productive spawn)would You keep everyone You caught from then on or do catch and relesae for a year? I really appreciate the info guys.CF

If your crappies spawned this year... You should see fingerling in the 3"-5" range, depending on the quality of the forage base in your pond. Try fishing a very small minnow or jig in thick cover in about 10 feet water right now. That should catch a few... If you confirm they spawned, I would keep every single crappie you catch, from little 3" ones on up... Trust me, plenty will survive to see another day and they will grow larger without all the other competition.

To add to the above, look up the fecundity of the average female crappie. I believe it is about 22,000 eggs per spawn. Now multiply that by the numbers of females. Even though their spawning is sporadic and that fecundity not unusual for sunfish species, they spawn earlier than the other pond denizens. Ewest notes that you have picked a most difficult goal to achieve and I think we all agree.

Lusk once posted about a pond/lake having tons of 7 year old crappie that averaged 4 inches in length. I think I would look at Hybrid Stripers for a balancing act.

O.K.. From what everyone has said, I better leave the LMB population alone for control of the BC. Thats works out fine with me because I am not as enthusiastic about bass fishing as I once was. I can start to target crappie now.

Also would like to ask if there is a method of getting some sort of forage started in an established pond. Like I said earlier, there are some pumpkinseed there but not like the LMB. Flier seem to be king in size but low numbers. Do I need to add some adult BG for more forage or buy some GSH? I don't want to buy some small forage just to give the established population a fast lunch. Any methods to keep them separate until some type of spawn occurs?

There is a downside to letting the LMB population just exist and stunt themselves.

They will be eating on the same forage base that you want your crappie to be eating on thus leaving less forage to get your crappie to grow bigger.

I don't know what everyone else thinks, but removal of LMB might help reduce yet one more variable.

I think Sunil's point is spot on. I've wondered if one couldn't have a successful crappie oriented pond by feeding and encouraging bluegill fecundity, nuking ALL bass below 4 or 5 pounds, and aggressively harvesting crappie for the table. Hopefully, this would allow a very large forage base for the crappie in a range they could utilize with minimal competition from the bass, and a large predator that could thin the crappie as well as consume some of the BG that are out of the effective range for crappie consumption. Sounds good in theory...but wouldn't account for the spawning variability of the crappie.

"...but wouldn't account for the spawning variability of the crappie."

We really haven't described this for CF.

Some years crappie pull of good, solid spawns where other years they somehow may not pull of good spawns hence the "variability."

I think if he starts keeping LMB he's going to end up with 7 tons of 4", or 3", crappie. I've personally fished more than one lake significantly bigger than 6 acres in which the same had happened. There's no way harvest by an angler, or even several anglers, can control even one good spawn by a crappie population, because it's not the numbers of adult crappie that take the lake from reasonably balanced to maxed out with tiny crappie, it's the tens or hundreds of thousands of tiny crappie that survive from one good spawn and are too big to be eaten by YOY bass by the time the bass have spawned. So by the time they're big enough to take a jig or minnow (and still far too small to eat), the lake is already overrun.

If he keeps the lake bass-heavy, there's at least a chance the many 10-12" LMB will keep any successful crappie spawn in check. But I think if he tries to manage the crappie without large numbers of a higher predator, he's going to end up with a lake full of see-through tiny crappie.

For my money, the method Eric quoted earlier in the thread from research done by Southeastern Pond Management sounds like it would be a good plan in this case. TS and GSH for forage, and HSB (along with the existing LMB) to control the crappie.

Whichever way you go, Crappiefarmer, having an aggressive predator that feeds heavily on crappie, present in good numbers in the pond, is going to be key.

Walt-

I definitely agree that a strong predator base will be critical, which is why I would leave all the larger bass in the lake, and hope that the 4#+ LMB would control the crappie numbers. I respect all the work the SE Pond folks are doing with crappie, HSB, TSH, and GSH-but it seems to me that the risk of crappie overgrowth may be higher in the long run. YOY crappie will probably not be targeted in the early spring by HSB when they're an inch or less, and all those crappie will put a real hurt on the YOY TSH and GSH...whereas a healthy BG population, spawning all summer, could be sustainable as a source of forage.

I suspect only time will tell, as more people try the SE Pond formula and we get their experience over several years.

Of course, if someone screws up and gets overcrappied, that would be a great opportunity to add some of those northern pike you're so fond of!

Out of many possible results, many will be crappie.