Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose HBG degradaton

ML - Since the pond is in Upper MI, I am pretty sure that they do not have access to hybrid striped bass (HSB).

rick-No. As ML: mentions you do need some predator and should introduce the predator before the HBG have a good first spawn. Largemouth bass fingerlings or smaller juneviles (6"-8") are a good first start. Your pond size of approx one acre could handle 80-120 LMB fingerling to put heavy pressure on the young HBG. The numnber of bass to stock is also dependant on how many HBG you initially introduced.

I have a pond near me that had a few HBG initially stocked in it and the pond has smallmouth bass as predators. You might want to stock SMB instead of LMB but the LMB would probably do a better job of reproducing and keeping young fish (HBG & bass) to a minimum. If you use SMB be sure to keep the SMB harvest to a bare minimum or none, so you always have plenty of bass to prey on HBG. Sometimes SMB do not always have good or successful spawns each year.

I sampled and fished the above mentioned pond last week. Initially 18 larger sized HBG were stocked in 1989 (17 yrs ago) by me into this 1/3 ac pond that contained SMB and yellow perch. I caught some large sized 8.5"-9" ?HBG?. To me they looked more like green sunfish than a typical HBG. I attributed this to after successive generations of HBG reproduction, the offspring that had the best survival advantage tended to have more GS like characters. I set some traps Sunday to be run tomorrow Tuesday. I will see if the traps catch any small sunfish types. HBG and green sunfish seem to enter traps well for me.

Keep us informed about the progress of your pond.