If your goal is mainly perch for harvest: "Harvest approximately 50 perch fall/winter of 2016 and 100-150 perch/year in the following years." Then I think you are stocking too few perch and too many predators per acre. I would consider making the perch 400-600/ac of two sizes: 4"-6" and 6"-8"; split 60:40 either way depending on how soon you want to have big perch for harvest. 60% 6"-8" will provide more larger per quicker but a little more expensive initially.

In a new weed free pond predators will crop all your minnow forage and then crop your recruitment of perch heavily thus requiring the supplemental annual stocking of YP as noted by TJ. If YP are really the main goal, I wouldn't stock any predators until you see excessive numbers of small YP 3"-5" feeding on pellets and they are not growing at 2" to 3" increase in length per year. Not growing or slow growing means too many perch. Adult pond spawned YP and not feeding on pellets will also eat some small YOY perch. A 10"-13" YP can easily eat 2"-3" YP. Each HSB-WE predator will significantly reduce the number of harvestable YP by 100-200 perch per year which is okay if you prefer having predators vs harvesting lots of perch. Predators are okay, they just reduce the harvestable amount of YP.

Advice for diversifying your forage fish is good and BNM and SFS can tolerate perch only predation but struggle to recruit with HSB and WE present depending on density of predator and amount of weed cover. Crayfish is also good in a perch pond. They provide additional food items and when common help with algae control which tends to be a problem in pellet fed ponds. Tilapia also can help in perch ponds to reduce algae problems. One amur (grass carp may help reduce weeds. Turbid water (12"-24") also helps reduce predation pressure on all species.

Create habitat for crayfish before the pond fills. Read the pond habitat posts by DonoBBD from Canada. This thread describes his pond. He has other threads that discuss his perch fishery, forage fish, and his crayfish.
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=408650#Post408650

Last edited by Bill Cody; 04/25/15 03:23 PM.

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