10 pikes in 1/4 acre pond? Oh, that's a short term deal...
At first I have to say that they won't stay at size you wish. Pikes grow fast and they eat much. After some time they will have consumed all of possible suitable fish and will eat your crappies. After that they will try to eat other pikes. In the first spring they will spawn and after that you'll get a pond of pikes... Most of them will be small and hungry (eating only some insects, frogs and other pikes).
Sounds like a horror story for you? I'll tell you a REAL story.
Sometimes I visit my friend and we used to go fishing crucian carps to a pond (~1 acre) - pond was full of them because these fish reproduce well (even better that that
). Once I asked him to go fishing but he replied that there is no point to go because of the lack of fish. I was surprised because last year I saw huge amount of fish, so I visited that pond.
Water was very clear and I didn't see any fish. Strange. After some fishing and watching I agreed that all those crucian carps were gone but where and how?
Nobody could catch all of them.
Predators couldn't be responsible for that because nobody stocked them.
After some thinking we decided that some irresponsible farmer in close neighbourhood used pesticides and fish died of that.
I visited the pond after some time and somehow I was lucky enough to see something like pike. I returned home, got my rod and soon caught a small pike. There were pikes, though.
That summer we both often went fishing to that pond. All we got were small and starving pikes.
I may imagine the whole situation. In the spring pikes managed to get into the pond. How? I think that's beavers fault. It travels from a nearest ditch to pond and back. Pikes like that ditch for spawning and probably fish eggs travelled to pond attached to beavers fur. If not beaver then maybe ducks did the same.
Some amount of them survived and started growing. Probably the first summer nobody could notice changes because pikes were still young and amount of crucian carps was sufficient. After some while they reached a bit more weight and started eating all around them. In the next summer I visited the pond and saw nothing...
What happens right now? Pikes are skinny and always hungry. Larger of them eat smaller ones and all possible live creatures - frogs, insects, some swimming mice and so on.
Too bad that I can't say how much pikes were there in the beginning. Maybe a great amount of them and that caused that rapid eliminating of those poor crucian carps. But anyway even 3 pikes (if not the same sex) could do the same but in a longer time.
Be careful with pikes in a small pond.
