Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations hsb stocking

I stocked 400 6" hsb in july of 04. My pond is ten acres. Since then I have only seen or caught four of these fish. The fish that we caught were about a pound and a half. Should I try stocking larger hsb or wait to see if maybe they are just hiding?

James,

July is a very bad time, very bad time to handle HSB, in my brief experience with them. I would guess you lost some, perhaps many to the stress of the transfer under those conditions. I assume you have LMB in the pond also? If so, the HSB were particularly vulnerable to predation at that time.

Bruce and George have both posted about significant losses of small HSB to LMB under the best of conditions. In July, I would guess the mortality is much, much higher.

Are you feeding? I usually can get a pretty good feel for how many and the rough sizes by carefully watching several feeding events.

What to do? I would try my best to determine how many, roughly that I had left. It seems that 400 is kind of a large number to start with. I think I started with 10 and as I became more comfortable with them have worked up to stocking 30 to 50 each spring and fall.

If all 400 had lived and grew out to 4 or 5 pounds, which is easily possible, you would have added as much as 2000 pounds of predator mass to your 10 acre pond. Most folks say 100 pounds per acre of predators total(LMB plus HSB plus any other predator) is the practical limit. I strive for much less, believing I need to operate with margins, particularly with a fish that I have never managed before.

It all depends on what you want and what your objectives were with stocking 400 HSB.

Regardless, my advice would be to never stock them other than spring or fall....and if you have LMB, try to find 8 inch or larger HSB for stocking or grow them out to that size yourself.

James,

Are these fish you bought from us? If so, my records indicate fish purchased in Winter, Spring, and July, but only 100 in July.

Thank you Todd your records are better than mine which is part of my problem. Is it 400 total? I am feeding twice a day but because of the low water levels I think the hybrids are staying out towards the middle of the pond. I also have an adult population of large mouth bass. I stocked 25 adult bass averaging four pnds and also some fingerlings. The fingerling bass were smaller than the hsb which makes me think that only the 35 adult bass would be a factor. I should note that I have a huge forage base of bluegill, tilapia, fatheads and shiners. There are also some crappie from the old lake left over. I do not know how many crappie are left because when we drained the old pond to renovate and enlarge it we netted all the crappie we could in about 6 inches of water. It rained the next day after draining it down to 6 inches and so some of the fish survived. We are finally getting rain and hopefully filling up the pond. This should improve the availability of the feed to the hybrids if the water around the feeder is deeper. My next thought is to start tagging the fish to keep track of their numbers. Does anyone else have any suggestions.