Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Should I stock 4-6 inch cnbg

I doubt it. The 6" BG will likely target the half grown minnows, but they would need to be pretty hungry to go after the big ones. The BG will eat a lot of other stuff in the ponds like nymphs, etc as a preference before they will go after fish. Fish are harder to catch than bugs and stuff on the bottom. In a survey that ewest has posted several times of the stomach contents of various sunfish, it was surprising how few fish were in their stomachs. The stomach survey did not state the size of fish in the study, but my guess would be that you need to get BG up in the 7-8" range before they really start targeting larger prey like fish. If there is nothing else to eat, the BG are going to eat whatever they can get in their mouth. But if your new pond had a good algae bloom and the food chain that goes right up in size up to the FHM, I would guess those 6" BG (and maybe a lot would be 4-5") would be targeting a lot of other things besides adult FHM as their preference.

One thing I had not thought about in my previous post, the larger fish will cause quicker populations of BG fry. I thought about culling out some of my 5-6" BG that had gotten too big for my 12-15" LMB to eat. By starting out with bigger BG, you might get a quicker population that would reach size too big for your LMB to eat. But if you are wanting to get the fishery going quick for your kids, that might not be a bad thing anyway. It might just mean you would want to remove some BG earlier if it looks like they are getting ahead of what your LMB could eat.

I'm just hypothesizing. Giving out ideas. I really don't have the experience to comment on what will happen, just what I think might happen. Now the guys with experience can expand or correct my thoughts.

Again about the pellets, if you are feeding you are likely going to see a mass of FHM pushing around a pellet trying to get it soft enough to eat a bite off of it, then see them scatter momentarily and a 6" BG come up from below and steal it from them. They will bypass the FHM for the pellet. I would not worry about a small number of 6" BG doing any significant damage to the FHM's.