Pond Boss Forums AQUATIC VEGETATION Identifying plants What could it be?

Found this while at the pond with Mr Steelman. Any thoughts? Maybe coontail?

Yes its coontail. man its a pain to get rid of and boy does it explode when the water is warm and clear.

How to get rid of?

Grass carp, chemicals, manual removal, or pond dyes are your primary options.

Pond dyes in late fall and early spring will keep it from getting the light it that it needs to grow an become a real nuisance this next summer.

A mix of Reward/Cutrine plus works well but is expensive and will likely need to be repeated in following years.

IIRC grass carp can be stocked at a rate of 8-15 GC per acre to control coontail.

If it were me I would go with GC and pond dyes to keep it under control. The clearer the water becomes the more it will become a nuisance throughout the pond. I have seen coontail reach the surface from 7-8ft down in real clear water.

To paraphrase Lusk, aqautic plants need the following three things to thrive, nutrients, light, and the right temperature to grow, take one of those three things away and your coontail will not thrive. Pond dyes will take away the light they need to thrive.

Shorty's mix of Cutrine and Reward is a good one. A longer lasting one is using Aqualthol Super K pellets. Both methods are utilizing contact herbicides. If you want to nuke it all in one application, its hard to beat flouridone (Sonar or Whitecap). It's pricey but very easy to use (no spray equipment needed) and nukes coontail at fairly low concentrations.

shorty keep in mind the dye will also take away light for phytoplankton, if the phytoplankton goes so does base of food chain. Easy to control with reward/copper mix just spot spray as needed and overall cost not that much anyway. SOme coon tail would be good for cover as well to protect small fish.

Actually Greg, we had coontail in our 10 acre pond and spending $1200-$1500 every year treating it became a significant cost, it was one of the reasons my dad sold the pond this last summer. Using chemicals as the sole means of control does NOT deal with the nutrient load, or the right water temperatures aquatic plants need to grow, or limiting the amount of light that the aquatic vegetation needs to grow. Take away anyone of those three things and aqautic vegetation will not thrive, reducing the amount of light available with pond dyes is by far the easiest of the three. Secchi disk readings in our pond ranged from 84" to 108" prior to using chemicals every year. Treating coontail when the water was warmer in late June frequently did induce a bloom as as the coontail decayed, the decaying coontail made nutrients available for a bloom which then reduced secchi disc readings to 24" to 36". IIRC Cody stated that usuable light required for aquatic vegation is 1.3 times the secchi disc reading. Getting a bloom started and maintained is also another way of limiting the amount of light that aquatic vegetation needs to grow and thrive.

Our case was a little different than most since we had a number of pin oaks around the pond. We seldom got a good bloom due to the oak leaves blowing into the pond every spring after ice out. We also had extremely clear water which let the coontail thrive in the deeper areas of the pond. Coontail around here seems to start to grow and thrive in the 55-60+ degree range, where as algea blooms around here start when the water temps are closer to 70 degrees or above. The other thing that happens when aquatic vegetation gets so abundant is that it can pull much of the nutrients out of the water before the temperatures get warm enough for a bloom to even start. It's a nasty little feed back loop where where the water gets clearer and the aquatic vegetation becomes more abundant, then water temperatures rise and no bloom occurs, then half of your pond is unfishable due to the coontail.

If we still had the pond I would have recommended a heavy stocking of GC plus the use of pond dyes in late fall and early spring. This would cut the light source source off to the coontail when the water was too cold for a bloom and when the coontail was more dormant and still laying on the bottom. IMO this would have been more cost effective over the long run than spending a significant amount of money on chemicals every year and would have been a more permanent solution to keeping the coontail under control.

shorty I understand your circumstance. If I had evualated your circumstance my first suggestion would have been to stock grass carp. If trying to grow fish check water chemistry and nutrients then try to maintain the bloom you mentioend in a range to deter macrophytic growth. I of course understand the big three. Since fatty just noticed I assumed it is spotty and you can zap it down easily at this point. I agree yearly herb apps are a waste.

Just wanted you and fatty to hear again the neg aspect of dye. To be clear you are better off from fish production standpoint with clear water vs. one dye filled during the growing season.

Greg, we did stock GC several times, just never in a high enough density (7-8 per acre) to ever notice any difference in the amount of aquatic vegetation. Due to all the farming around here Nebraska does have very fertile water which was part of the problem with excessive weed growth. Most lakes and ponds around here have nice strong blooms every summer without fertilizing, in fact it is illegal to fertilize ponds in NE. Initially we had milfoil growing to the surface in 7-8ft of water. We used Navigate for a number of years to treat the milfoil which doesn't work as well on coontail, with the nutrient load still unchanged in the pond the coontail took over after a couple of years of using navigate.

I understand the negative aspects of using dye but we are talking about using it only during the late fall and early spring and only during the non-growing season to limit the amount of light available.

I think Fatty has a good bit of coontail. We launched the boat from the dam and went about half way to the back of the pond. I was getting it there so I would assume the rest of the upper end would be covered with it as well.

shorty 10-4 on using durign off saeson or early season. Where you gettign large neough grass carp. Folks here want to save a few bucks and get 8-10 inch they windup bass food but 11 inch or bigger have more girth. Too bad it is illegal and yes big diff in fertility up your way. However I think more folks need to look into slight additons of fertilizer if you know what your doing I think it might work to get bloom enough to grow more fish and deter weed growth at sametime. It seems lots of bom and bust bloom up there that I think with monitoring could be tweaked.

Chris, glad you noticed it then. Fatty you better have game plan in place come spring time.

Greg, the first batch of 75 GC were triploids 10-12", the second batch of 75 were diploids 8-10". Both stockings were when the primary weed in the pond was milfoil which happens to be low on a GC's preference list. I would frequently spook pods of GC while fishing last summer, a few of the initial stocking GC are still present from 20 years ago and are over 4ft long.

My gut feeling is that if one used pond dyes to keep secchi disk readings down to 24-36" early in the year then you would still get a bloom in the summer as dyes broke down. This would probably keep the coontail under control during the time it likes to grow when the water warms and then leave enough nutrients in the water for a bloom to start.

IMO aeration and possibly bacteria are the ways to reduce the high nutrient loads.

I am thinking GC is my choice. I will pick up a few from Overton this spring

Hornwort is particularly sensitive to copper sulphate, unlike many other aquatic plants. At 3ppm you can selectively kill off all Hornwort and most other aquatic plants will survive

If there are fish on the pond, those will be driven to the surface due to oxygen depletion and you have a brief time to collect those fish you want to salvage before the effects of the copper sulphate begin to harm them

Useful for a smaller size pond...

Regards, andy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21940871@N06/

As Andrew mentions make sure it is a very small pond and fish are removed first or very quickly as they appear. At 3ppm of copper sulfate dissolved in the water, you will be killing most if not all the fish depending on refuge areas available. Dissolved copper at the correct dosage can be quickly lethal.

Bill's warning is sound - trust me I've been there at much lower levels than that.

The lower the alkalinity the more likely you are to encounter CUSO4 shutting down the ability of fish to breath. BTW don't count on the fish being able to move far to escape to safe areas.

I have seen very bad Coontail problems before. The only thing that I have seen work really well is use of a product called Sonar Q. It systemically kills the plant preventing regrowth. There are no fishing restrictions placed on this product either