Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Ladder stock HSB?

I remember an old message Bruce Condello responded to when talking about HSB....

Talk about a crazy pond while it lasted....
Maybe he could talk about it some tonight on the live feed?

From Bruce Condello:

"I’ve accomplished something that’s rarely been done, or even attempted for that matter. I stocked and managed a pond that had 2,500 pounds of HSB per acre!!! My pond was the envy of every pondmeister in the Midwest. Maybe one of the best fishing ponds ever. A one-acre pond with an average depth of 7 ft. and a maximum depth of 16 feet. Clear water, teeming with wipers. Everything you threw in the water was viciously attacked! We’d throw topwaters without hooks just to watch the frenzy. I’d invite friends for evenings of flyrodding, beer and constant action. On a good day I could feed an entire 50-lb. bag of Silver Cup steelhead chow in 15 minutes. I pushed the envelope as far as it would go. I ignored recommendations just to see what I could do. And it worked…for almost two years………….and then the crash………

I was at my pond to refill the feeders. When I came over the hill it was a windy, warm late June afternoon. I noticed that the waves were leaving white foam on the windward side. Odd, I thought, that so much foam was accumulating. Hmmm, I’ll just go grab a bag of feed, but wait a minute, that’s not foam, its dead fish! Hundreds of them, 450 of them to be exact. Deader than dead. From four pounds all the way up to 16 pounds. Enough to bring tears to a grown man’s eyes. The clean up took an entire week with rubbers gloves, a John Deere Gator, and a shovel to dig holes for the gruesome remains of my beloved fish. Is there a lesson here? Not really. I knew it could happen. I actually expected it to happen. It was fun while it lasted.

I’ve since stocked the same pond with 50 fish instead of 500. The growth rates are excellent and they’re still a blast to watch feed. I also have several hundred big bluegills that like the feed too. I’m having just as much fun and I don’t have to keep as much beer on hand. I think I’ll ultimately need fewer therapy sessions.

Back to your question. 100 pounds of HSB per acre is a manageable number. That's 75 pounds for you. You can easily start with 150 smaller fish but you have to be prepared to harvest as the total biomass starts to exceed 75 pounds. If you stock this many HSB your bluegill will be intimidated and won’t utilize the feed as much. You may have to get creative and find ways to get the pellets to your panfish as well. A summertime water profile analysis would be helpful. Aeration IS NOT an absolute necessity if your water quality is good and you have some oxygen present in the deeper cooler layers. A thermocline allows HSB to hang out a little deeper on a hot summer day in a low stress environment. I wouldn’t feed them at all when the mean daily air temperature exceeds 82 degrees F. Some people will buy a device which runs the aerator only at night to prevent mixing hot surface water with cooler, deeper water. Ideally you would find a way to evaluate dissolved oxygen throughout the water column on hot days so you could determine how to make best use of an aerator.

Since you don’t currently have predators in your pond you should stock based on water temperature. Don’t buy, handle, or stock HSB when water temperatures are below 50. Your fish will get a nasty green fungus on their fins and may die. Really 60-65 is optimal stocking temp. HSB can be purchased at a pretty reasonable cost for 4-inchers. Maybe 75 cents to 1.25/each. HSB are often collected by growers by size, meaning that the faster growing, more aggressive, better converting fish are collected first. The primary reason for this is that the growers want to sell these fish first. They have a name for these bigger, faster growers. It’s “cannibal”. See if you can get these. A four-inch HSB will not eat another HSB of similar size but it will attempt to eat a two-incher. The two-inchers have a name. It’s “lunch”.

If your pond is bowl shaped and if you don’t have a lot of macrophytes (rooted vegetation), your HSB may do a fair job of controlling bluegill, but don’t depend on it. HSB will always retain a little of their piscivorous nature, but they will always take the pellets first and foremost. This is called optimal foraging theory. Least energy expended for energy gain. Bluegills are a nice morsel, but they represent a little too much work for your HSB.

Remember, you can have as many HSB as you want, but the percent chance of sudden, cataclysmic failure starts to nudge upwards with the number of fish present. "