Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations planning a PB member Yellow Perch experiment

All small fish species including your goldfish will eat fish eggs. Removing every YP egg ribbon you can find and you still have ample small YP lends merit to may comment above "There will always be a few (ribbons)laid deeper that you do not see. These few ribbons will provide more YP than you need since you have no predators. Number of predators of small YP has a big influence on the amount of recruitment of YP into a pond.

Sunfish of 4-5" RES and LES and most other small fish species (>5") will primarily only eat the "fry" of YP. Once they become good swimmers at 1", sunfish predation is basically nill on YP. Fish fry of 1/4"-5/8" are pretty vulnerable to sunfish predation. GSH will eat mostly newly hatched fry of YP for about 2-6 days after YP fry swim-up.

In your small pond without significant predators of the 1"-3" fish be watchful that the pond does not get too many forage fish, small foods become limiting and overall growth "hits the wall". I would remove every YP less than 4" that you catch in traps. IMO your pond will soon need a limited number of predators to maintain some sort of 'natural' predator prey balance.
Carefully watch the goldfish they can quickly overcrowd a small pond with unusable fish biomass.