Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Analyzing TJ's Pond- Evaluate My Fishery

TJ - that black mush in crappie stomachs is usually mostly comprised of zooplankton. You should enjoy my crappie article in Mar-Apr 2013 PBoss.

No, not often. I have been told if I had any kind of population I'd see them swimming the shorelines at twilight? Anyhow, I've had three trappers out and they all were like, meh - not worth my time, you have no population here. My point is...I want ZERO population!

Thanks Bill, I figured they were invertabrates of some kind...that explains stomach contents of a lot of fish I've cleaned...zooplankton.

Also, loved the SMB article with Dave. Good stuff there, I learned some new things.

TJ,
great snapshot. your on a great path! Glad to see you stocking advanced size smallies every year, that is truly a big key to growing trophy fish of pretty much any species...even though the yellow perch are reproducing, just view those little guys as forage, the ones born in your pond wont ever amount to anything, I would stock advanced size perch annually as well....

So from my point of view, seeing how you love both ice fishing and perch so much I definitely would wage war on the bluegill and redears in the 4-7" range....since you dont have largemouth bass those are completely worthless fish for you, you have your work cut out for you.

get creative and get em out every chance possible....I would fasten some structure to the underside of your floating dock so as to not get in the way of swimmers, but to help congregate the little bastards where they are easily accessible to you and your kids and your kids friends with ice fishing jigs (during the summer time) and would make contests on catching and removing the most of them....you would be surprised at how big of a dent you can put in them when you target them specifically...I have moved 1000's and 1000's of unwanted fish from my 3 acre pond doing that...(a 3 acre pond which I unfortunately no longer own, man I miss that pond...)

So anyhow I know you dont like much structure, but I would make one very cool reef out in the middle in the 16' water for just a rock solid place to ice fish and also give your fish a nice home feel or better yet give em disneyland out in the desert or six flags to visit (not county fair feel though)...People like a little scenery and so do fish....happy fish are much happier than bored fish.... hey if debris like structure is not your thing, than you should consider adding current to your pond...moving water horizontally or vertically makes fish happier than anything...current is the most underutilized fish making happy tool on the planet...get creative, but watch your pond come alive when you figure out how to make a river in your pond or simply how to move some water in there....

So there is my advice for you, you are already way beyond cutting edge with what your doing with that pond, my hat is off to you and like many others, I look forward to catching a fish off your dock this summer! Although when I come, im gonna train your smallies to eat out of my hand by the end of just one day....the 4-7" bluegill they will eat, but mainly only when they are injured...also smallies are super curious fish when your underwater they are not generally scared of you....by staying a few feet underwater I will get em to eat and then after a few days of that you can just lean over your dock and they are ready to gorge on your live offering.....

Nate - I bought 200 3-4" YP, caged and grew them out to 6-7" this Fall and released. Weird thing though, I only ended up with 75 fish in October. No holes in cage, no way for any predators to get them...but I did release probably 25 emaciated fish with pinch bellies that apparently never got trained. Still, half my fish are unaccounted for. At any rate, great advice, and I'm going to continue to release 100-200 advanced YP every Fall as they are my favorite fish to harvest.

Few items for anyone's feedback:

I am going to employ a fyke net to help remove BG this Summer. I read a nice post from someone on the forum - sounds like a good size is only around $300. It sure beats throwing a cast net for 10-15 BG per net. Gets tiring and the BG get skiddish fast - they learn pretty fast when they see me throw a time or two to get under cover. What do you think about the fyke net for BG management?

I want my RES to grow! I never see any snails anywhere - I realize they will utilize other forage like my grass shrimp, but I'm concerned they are not growing fast. What can I do to help my RES grow? Just remove them along with BG to relieve some pressure on their preferred forage niches?

I've considered stocking some MALE LMB to help control BG...with Males topping at 2.5-3# their gape should be perfect for 5-6" BG and RES....what do you think? How many/acre? I was thinking of starting with 10-15 fish and going from there. Yes, of course I will be 100% certain the fish is milting prior to trying to id sex.

I want hand trained SMB, we don't have your water clarity, but it's not too far behind at about 3-4' between blooms. Come and show me how it's done.

What do you think of adding Chain Pickerel to the mix to help manage BG? I fear they would hammer my YP as well, which I'm trying to protect - and I have zero experience with Chain pickerel or their ability to spawn in a pond - which I do NOT want. Would they help manage the BG? At what cost?

What do you think of the ladder stocking of HSB [25-50] annually to replace my aging population?

How about my ladder stocking of WE? The small WE I've caught are pretty skinny - I worry about lack of forage to sustain a much larger population.

Lastly - what about my forage base...should I consider adding a minnow species that might establish a sustainable population to help take pressure off the GSH? What minnow would I choose - bluntnose? Would you recommend using blocking nets and allowing them to exist for 6-8 months [and reproduce several times] prior to releasing?

Thanks in advance - see you this Spring - it's Zipline time!

TJ, refresh n8ly's picture of your bottom contour for where you want to use the Fyke net.

I'd like to hear what people say about the RES too..

2:1 slopes - but Nate and his crew have swam there so they should know it gets pretty deep fast. Are those depths not consistent with fyke net performance?

I'm interested in seeing n8ly's response since I don't have much experience running a shock boat.

I have all the mgmnt tools at my disposal, fykes, seines, traps, and shock boat....but for your situation TJ, I would suggest keeping your money in your family....your boy is old enough for a summer job and at $.10 per bg removed that would be the most productive $300 you could spend in a summer....

I would strongly discourage lmb for a smallie pond, go another route....
For the walleyes you would greatly benefit from stocking bigger fish each year as opposed to the little ones.....just think if U stocked 5-10 of those 14" + walleye every year...look at how fast they would thrive, and how happy you would be....

Def stay away from pickeral, bad idea...

Let me think of a way to get redear sunfish to grow today, u just focus on removing tons of em and surely we will come up with some options on growing em from there...

<------ loves this thread.

I am interested in seeing if the HSB, WE, and SMB in TJ's pond can keep the BG population under control as time goes by.

As for my experience with RES, I only catch a few each year. I've stocked them a number of times, and I see really big ones spawning every season. For some reason they don't seem to have any significant population, and I don't know why. But, yet when I do catch one, it is "whoa, strap on the safety belt.". We almost always throw them back, so we sure aren't over fishing them.

Here is one that I took out last year that had fin rot. RES

As I look out at the blowing snow, and the thermometer is showing 16 degrees, maybe I'm on the northern boundary of where they will thrive.

Cat, do you think your CC and LMB probably keep their population managed to the point where there's plenty of invertabrates and crustaceans for them to mow on and perform very well? I've been so focused on establishing a RES population I've never moved a single fish with exception of stocking my BRES pond and Condello has moved several smaller fish for his dubious experiments.

3°F here this morning and RES survive in my pond and the local lakes. I've experienced temps in the -20's and almost 3' of ice on the local lakes in previous years and the RES have survived. Now, that may be due to some underwater natural groundwater springs in the lake bottom, giving them a slightly warmer water refuge, but knowing what I do about groundwater DO, I don't know if the O2 levels would be high enough in the warmer water for them.

I unfortunately don't have any real answers to my RES issues. The BG seem to do fine, and I feel I have more than one state record residing in my pond -- which I would never publicly advertise if I catch it. The CC out-do themselves -- but that is a whole different issue. My LMB have extremely low relative weights, and we catch them like most people catch stunted bluegill or greensunfish in other ponds.

But, I am really intrigued by the rest of this thread, and what Nate and TJ have posted. I don't want to hijack it.

I would really like to see the discussion between Nate and TJ continued, along with ideas from others about this. I have a 20 year old pond, a one year old pond, and I plan to put in one more pond this spring.

Would it be worth renewing a pond (killing it, and starting over) every so often as a pond ages? It is something I'm certainly thinking about.

It seems like this would be perfect for an article in Pond Boss if collaborated by several.

Ken, I would also give consideration to that idea on my one pond that has the problematic dam. I've considered trying to really develop it just accepting it at the level where it is currently, but would almost prefer to just start completely over with it before doing anything.

TJ, outstanding results, brother. I found your answers to Nate's questions to be really interesting and enlightening in showing me how little I actually do for my ponds three years into ownership.

TJ,
With how your pond is setup with smallies and yellow perch, I would steer clear of trying to grow big redear sunfish in the pond. I been thinking how to grow bigger ones in your pond, but really I wouldn't want their preferred food to be plentiful... Yellow perch and smallmouth both seem to be pretty wormy fish prone to parasites..... keeping the snails cleaned up will only help cut down on parasites.. Basically what I'm saying is you don't want to create ideal redear habitat and food...

So you are gonna have to grow big redears somewhere else and move them into your main pond...also prob don't cull the small redears, but rather just have the boy focus on removing the bluegills....

Can you get more big walleye like you got the three 14 inchers?

Yes, but it's not easy in NE, at all. I could cage a some smaller WE and feed them a steady diet of BG...it's a thought.

ok, so if sourcing bigger fish isnt an option, then maybe along the same lines of what your thinking....maybe consider stocking the small ones 5" which should be available and raising them in the pond like your doing, but when you catch them in the 11-13 inch range put them in the cage and feed them a steady diet of minnows and bluegills to beef em up for a few months and then let em go.... I think if you can get em over the hump and into the next size class of forage availabity that they will flourish just like the ones you put in advanced sized...

plus believe it or not, once you get them trained in the cage to eat your injured bluegill offerings, then you will be able to keep them on your injured bluegill offerings right off your dock!! I cant get the walleye to eat directly out of my hand, but I can get them to eat injured bluegill I toss out in the water!!

Same with crappie, they too will eat pretty big bluegill injured from the dock....the only problem I can see though that will hamper your training your fish to eat is that the dock is also your favorite place to fish....

At my place the dock that we train the fish to eat from our hands we dont allow any fishing...the fish have picked up on that for sure and the biggest fish in the whole lake live at that dock and are very happy to see people coming out onto it!

I can always tell though when someone has been fishing (poaching) from that dock because it takes the fish a couple days to become friendly/brave again right out in the open...

so basically what Im saying is when we come to Nebraska this spring we are gonna need to build ya another dock....

With what little experience I had with walleye in cages, it does not work very well. The individuals in the cage kept trying to eat the similar sized siblings. IMO this is why. Walleye are primarily fish eaters (piscivors and similar to those in the pike family and quite canibalistic) while other fish including basses are more omnivorous not so canibalisic and will readily live together in cages and learn to eat introduced foods. I hope I am wrong in this so someone can be successful at growing WE in cages to teach me how to do it. :-)))). Your best method would be to keep the cage full or crowded with small edible fish. Two hurdles with this method are: A. the mesh would have to be small enough to contain small feeder fish and small mesh cages tend to clog fast with filamentous algae. B. manually cleaning cages is stressful on the contained fish and walleye are water quality sensitive. Big losses are likely to occur.

IF you want larger sized WE stockers I suggest you stock them a 2"-3" fingerlings, grow them in a small drainable pond that is full of feeder fish such as minnows, shiners, YOY perch, and/or baby bluegills. Use method similar to that described by Mark Cornwell in the Jan-Feb 2013 PBoss magazine article "Walleye Stocking Guidelines". Then when they are 10"-14" long move them to the main pond. Large sized YOY WE really nice 7"-11" fish have been available for me grown from somewhere in SD - probably in winter kill prarie ponds. It may be an option for n8ly to get some on the truck's way to Ohio in the fall. Dr Dave may know of the source. I can probably find out the name of the source if needed.

IMO if you want large RES in the main pond, do what we do to get other large panfish stockers- grow them in cages then move pellet trained adults into the main pond. This way the adult, actively growing redears are not depending on mollusks for food. Redears, as you all know, are notorious for being hard to pellet train so be prepared for that challenge. Get that perfected and teach us how to do it successfully - :-)))))

Good thoughts guys...I've seen many struggle with RES pellet training and lost majority of fish. Not sure being absentee I can really spend the time/effort necessary to get them from bloodworms to pellets successfully. So, my RES are on their own, unfortunately - unless I got brazen enough to try stocking some kind of mussel/clam/other bivalve species or additional snail species....Bill what's your take on either of these routes? Trapdoor Snail?

Nate I'm committed to continuing growing out YP and stocking in the Fall. I need to figure out the cannibalism going on by more frequently netting the fish and examining their condition however, and release all the runts/skinny fish to give them a better chance in the main pond. Hopefully results will improve this year over last year.

On the WE - we're seeing 5-6" at 11-14" now in 15 mos. Not sure if that growth is acceptable or not...they are skinny fish for sure, although not pinch bellied, and I know forage availability is probably low for their current gape.

I would be real cautious about trapdoor snails. They get too big probably quickly for RES predation and have thick shells. Any way you can at home pellet train some RES in the Condello Poor-Boy RAS?

No room for RAS, sadly. RES are on their own, I guess.