Snipe I am no pro but have been reading on this forum for a few years and manage 5 ponds of my own....
Stocking a relative small number of BG can actually lead to more fish rather than less. In some very old research papers, stocking only as few as 5 pair of BG produced enough offspring to completely provide fish to reach carrying capacity of the pond quickly. In fact, stocking more initially actually led to lower overall fish populations, the reason being the initial stocked fish became predators for newly hatched fish of the first and subsequent spawns. So the 5 pairs produced more spawned reproduction than say if the a hundred fish were initially stocked, because of lowered predation.
