Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain CNBG stocking from adults

I have been using the search button, but cannot find an answer.

If one has excellent genetics and quality cnbg in a pond stocked 4 years ago, could one harvest a few and put into a pond that ONLY has FHM? I want to stock another pond, which is a fairly good sized pond, but i was thinking of stocking a few (relative) adults and letting them spawn and grow 1 season prior to adding bass. it seems way cheaper than buying thousands of 1-2 inch fish if you have excellent genetics.

I have read that in some places, it is worrisome to add CNBG without bass, but if goal is to grow trophy LMB, and you live in the south, it is probably ok.




thanks for the advice.

I took BG from my two year old pond and stocked my old pond that was over run with GSF and BH. That stocking turned out ok. The BG eventually got the upper hand on the GSF and I also stocked a few 12-15" LMB the same way.

Old, old extension papers talk about stocking ponds with adult pairs of BG. 5 to 10 pairs as I recall. Too many pairs and the adults actually eat a lot of the new hatched fry, so not a lot of adult fish were needed to maximize fry production.

Biggest danger is not knowing how many fry you will get. If you stock 500 BG fry you get 500 fry. If you stock adult pairs you might get ten thousand or a hundred thousand fry. Hard to regulate the desired quantity. In other words you could easily over stock the pond. In my case I had GSF for fry predation so it took a year or two to build BG population.

Yes what you describe will work. I have used adult BG plenty of times. It would be best if you use more than a few and from at least 2 genetic lines. I would not try to fill up a big pond with only 20 or so related CNBG. It might work well but I would try at least 2 or 3 sources.

Thanks for the advice. The new pond will be 10 acres surface area when full, but it is only 3-4 acres at this point. 10/acre sound reasonable?

That is a big BOW to bucket stock.

I would buy at least a 100 CNBG adult, and 100 RES adult to go along with what you catch and transport. I would get about 30#s of FHM too.

For 2 acre pond I stocked the following"

35# FHM
500 2"-3" RES
300 3-5" CNBG
500 2-3" CNBG
2500 fingerling CNBG

In theory you would need 5X that amount

Dustin,

I'd try to do 20-30/acre at a minimum. I don't think 10/acre would be enough.

You could do what you suggested with 100 adult CNBG if they were about 50/50 male /female, from 3 different genetic sources and you have enough time. 2 full years IMO. Year one 50 pairs produce between 500,000 and 1,000,000 offspring with reduced predation. If only 10% survive to adulthood then the next spawn by those and the original stockers will be in the millions range. That will fill the pond for any LMB to follow the next year.

FWIW average time to reach carrying capacity with BG/LMB type ponds in the south is 18 months.