Several important items are required for consistently growing only yellow perch in ponds. The smaller the pond is the easier it is to maintain as a yellow perch only pond. In my experiences the best size for perch only ponds are ones of 0.2 to 0.5 acre. Smaller ponds make it simpler to manually remove excess small perch whenever necessary. A second feature is to have limited or reduced amount of vegetation so adult perch or a few predators can locate small perch. Reduced vegetation will also make it easier to manually catch small perch for thinning the numbers. Using feed trained stocker perch is a very big benefit because supplemental feeding keeps the perch growing well to harvestable size. Minimizing the chances of food limited conditions keeps numerous perch growing well. IMO the two most important items are keeping the numbers at a realistic density and keeping fish from becoming food limited. Trying to grow too many perch per acre will result in reduce water quality and nuisance algae problems.
I think very few people manage for just yellow perch because of a couple main reasons:
1. Lack of knowledge of how to do it. Plus the management methods are different and techniques of how to do it are not commonly available for growing only panfish in a pond.
2. Most pondowners prefer to grow exciting, large hard fighting predator fish and panfish are usually a secondary goal that are necessary to achieve exciting predator fish.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 01/16/14 07:57 PM.
