Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Gold fish feeders?

Ok I have a buddy that has a back yard pond with gold fish in it. In the spring he cleans it all out to get the muck out of the bottom. He has a few fish he likes to keep but every year they have little ones.

Would it be fine to drop 1000 of these gold fish into the .75 acre pond to feed the perch. Perch have just been place into the pond 4-6" 400 perch pellet trained.

Is it fine for feed or with we end up with a problem with the young perch fighting for feed?

All thoughts welcome.

Cheers Don.

I encourage you not to stock goldfish into a pond...they can grow, reproduce, not a good situation. Unless you are feeding fish in a cage or tank, don't use goldfish as bait or forage - why waste carrying capacity on a goldfish population that's overgrown the gape of your predators? Good question, but I would advise against this.

I second the 'no goldfish' recommendation. Maybe with LMB but certainly not with perch. They quickly get too big for the perch to eat.

They are basically just carp and while not competing directly with the adult perch for food, they will grow very large and lock up a large portion of the biomass in your pond. I suspect they will compete directly with the very young perch but I'm far from an expert in such matters. Their offspring are numerous and predominantly brown.

My house came with a little pond and the pond came with goldfish. I managed to trap one that was 7" and I think there were bigger ones in there. Judging from the lack of little ones in summer of 2011 (when I bought the place), I think they were in there for two years at the most.

This past summer the pond (only .1 acres and 6' deep max) dried up. There were a few weeks where the water was down to 1' and about the size of a large car. I was still able to net dozens of the YOY goldfish. They are very tolerate of poor conditions.

Incidentally, the pond also went pretty low in 2011 (roughly 2' max depth). They were able to survive and fill the pond with YOY the next spring.

My opinion: if you put goldfish in, they'll get out of control quickly and you'll be fighting them forever.

#3 here for "no goldfish".