Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Yellow perch in cages

I would like a little diversity in my Rainbow trout pond. I was thinking of perch in floating cages. I know Cecil and Bill Cody have experience in this. Something small scale, mainly for table fair. Any thoughts on this, or should I leave well enough alone?
Thanks, John.

It would be worth a try just for the experience.

Perch can be easily raised in cages. Many buy perch already feed trained. The smaller the perch are the easier it is to feed train them. "Wild" perch with a little patience and proper methods can be trained in 3 to 6 days to eat at least softened pellets. Once on softened pellets they can be converted to hard pellets in a week or so. Some raisers train directly to eat hard pellets but I have my best success training larger fish with softened pellets.

Cage size can be as small as a 55 gallon barrel to large cages 4'x4'x 4'to 6' long. Cecil uses bigger cages I use smaller ones.

Adding fish biomass to your pond will contribute and account for some of its carrying capacity.

You could try this, however I would expect it would take you two summers in your growing region to get perch from 3" to 8". I'm not sure how you would over winter fish in a cage with your type of winter. I think? you could start with 6"-7" fish when water is 50F to 55F and add around 2" to them in one summer. Maybe not due to the cooler water of your trout pond. My perch in cages are subjected to 70F&80+F water temps from end of May to mid Sept.. I know I can easily do this in my area but my fish are a somewhat domesticated strain which could make a big difference in trainability and growth rate.

Cecil feeds twice a day I feed mostly once a day, 6 days a week.

Bill, wild caught is all I have access to. My water temp is currently 64 in all depths. I would like to do this year round but also doubt over wintering. With ice at 36" thick and after seeing the massive slabs heaving in spring, I would think the cages would be destroyed. Do perch spawn in these pens normally?. I would consider adding perch to my pond but have no baitfish and don't think I could pellet train them if they were free-swimming. I would also worry about over-population and subsequent stunting even if they would take to some feed. Trout do not do a good job of controlling perch in local lakes around here.

I don't want to spoil a good thing, we've caught and released over 300 trout from an original stocking of 150 a year ago May. I feed every day now and am impressed at their growth. I would just like a little diversity and something for a meal once in awhile. Thanks for the info Bill.
John.

You can't winter the perch in cages and you can't let them swim free without a predator or they will stunt. Perch are very tolerable of the cold temps, but even in Wisconsin they tend to stunt because the Bass don't feed heavily enough in the cool temps.

It sounds like you have a good thing going, maybe you shouldn't mess with it.

Brian, good advice, I agree. You guys don't know how lucky you are if you have a choice of what you can put into your pond. Maybe I can find some Brook trout next spring to add a little diversity.

You can overwinter perch in cages with up to 16" of ice from late Dec to early-mid Mar. Ice at Wood's place gets 36"+ and winter is very, very long in his area. This overwinter cage thing would probably not work for Wood.

We have raised perch without stunting in small ponds in NW Ohio with out predators. The only predators in the pond are large perch. In fact our best perch ponds where we catch the most keeper perch per hour of fishing are from those ponds with out predators. Bob Lusk wants me to write an article for PBoss mag this winter / early spring about our experiences.

LM bass eliminate perch in our small ponds in OH. From our experience perch become stunted primarily when they do not get enough food (fish, "bugs" or pellets) and / or rooted weeds are too abundant and small perch have too many hiding places. Feeding perch pellets helps keep perch growing and minimizes stunting.

Bill,

I would be very interested in this article. I do know people that grow just yellow perch and harvest everything over 9" but this does not help when they end up with an invasive species like bullheads. The herons are too common here to prevent unwanted stocking.

I encourage the release of larger perch so they can prey on, and help control smaller 2" -4" perch. When you harvest most all the the 9" perch they never grow to 10", 11", 12" or 13". I prefer the selective harvest or slot harvest of mid-range sizes of 8" to 11"; return those over 11" or 12".

Contamination from unwanted fish esp "trash" fish upsets the balance in almost all ponds. The invasive species competes and often decreases the numbers of preferred species.

Actually I believe overwintering will work but you have to do it right. I will probably be overwintering bluegills this year as they are going to be stocked into a pond but the pond has not been built (still waiting for excavator #$@%) and I want to be sure to be able to sex them 100 percent and this is not the time of year to do it.

Here's how I will do it as I have simply floated one in the ice before and it was weighted down and sunk somewhat. Most of the fish survived but most escaped due to the sinking.

Once water temps drop into the 40's and stay there I will cover the top of the cage (I have cages at least 7 feet in diameter) with the same material the sides and bottom are made of. I will probably give the cage a good cleaning in and out with a push broom standing on the pier and rotatiing this square cage to remove algae build up before sinking. I will use black plastic lock ties to secure the top and will make sure there is no avenue of escape. My PVC frame have holes drilled into them to allow the PVC to fill with water and sink evenly, but they are floated with orange juice containers, mineral spirits containers, laundry detergent etc. I will one by one remove these and attach one side of the cage to about 3 1/2 feet of nylon rope and the pier and the other sides of the cage I will secure these air filled containers with the same length rope. Therefore my 4 foot deep cage will have the top of the cage about 3 1/2 feet below the water surface and the bottom of the cage where most of the fish will converge will be about 7 feet below the surface of the water. With the water depth at this point about 11 feet that means the bottom of the cage will be about 4 feet off the bottom. The fish need a slightly warmer santuary in winter which is closer to the bottom as we all know. I'm pretty confident this will succeed and will keep you posted.

Cecil, I'm curious. Although I have no current intention of raising fish in cages, is there or could there be any benefit to round cages as versus square ones? PVC has a lot of corner building gadgets and probably no or few parts to build round stuff but it seems that it would keep them from stacking in corners. But then, I have no practical experience to know if that is a real benefit.

Dave,

Bill Cody can tell you more about the round cages, and I believe to make round cages you use water line material that has a tendency to round it self out and just connect the ends.

I prefer the square cages because they are easier to clean algae buildup off for me. I stand on the pier and vigorously brush up and down the side of the cage on the inside and then the outside, and then rotate the cage to get the next side and so forth. I also allow the cage to float over a diffuser to break up algae build up on the bottom of the cage while I am cleaning. In my fertile pond I sometimes have to do this once weekly and don't think it would be as easy with a round cage.
But I could be wrong.

I also make cages up to 10 feet in diameter which may have some bearing on shape of the cages. I do not have any problems with fish bunching up in the corners and no visible damage on the surface of the fish. However, I may be growing the densities others are. I have about 100 bass in a 7 X 7 X 4 cage which comes out to about 200 cubic feet. My bass are getting close to release at about 9 to 11 inches. I have bass in three cages right now and bluegills in another.

I don't feed the morning preceding cage cleaning to reduce stress. What amazes me is how well bass grow and handle living in cages. They seem to be resilent to the stress of cleaning too as they will feed normally that same evening after a day of cleaning the cages.

What I believe really helps me with the success of my cage culture is I have a diffuser on the bottom between two cages on one side of the pier and between another two on the other side of the pier. I have then set up so the diffuser not only pushs water to each cage on each side of the diffuser, but the flow also goes sideways to the other side of the pier into one of the other cages. I would not advise putting a diffuser right under the cages permanently as too much flow stresses bass and bluegills. It would probably be just fine for trout though.

Actually my bluegill cage is farther away from the flow then the bass cages as they are a more sendentary fish.

If any of you would want to try feed training, attempting it in a cage is an option if you crowd them enough and they are small enough in size.

Dave - I originally started raising fish in square or rectangular cages; I have one that I still use. Still early in the "cage raising game",,,I read and was told that hybrid striped bass had best survival and growth in round cages. Round cages allowed them to keep swimming in circles and not get bunched up in the corners. When I learned this, I started making all my cages round.

Bill,

That may very well be true with hybrid striped bass that are more pelagic than largemouths. However I have not seen any problems with my largemouths in square cages however my densties are not that high.

So Bill, did you ever write the article about raising perch and such as you mentioned?

JoeG - The yellow perch article has not been composed yet for Pond Boss mag. I gave the editor a long list of titles of articles for setting them in a priority for me to work on. Editor may want other articles ahead of the perch article. Since your profile is complete, I will contact you to send you an email about another perch article. Check to see that your e-address is correct on the profile; if not, email something to me. My first attempt to send email to you failed.