Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Stocking a new pond ?

We have a whole lot of RES discussion here. If you put on your hip boots and wade through the humorous threads showing them biting off fingers, saving schools of small fish from barracuda, and other factually challenged activities, you should see the kind of RES Pros and Cons discussed below.

RES get bigger than any other Lepomis species or hybrid, including BG and HBG. They spawn only once per year, so they have much, much lower potential to overpopulate and stunt than BG do (many experienced PMs have stated they have never seen a stunted RES pond). They do produce notably more offspring than HBG, but since they breed true, you don't need to 1) restock later or 2) wonder what weird Nth generation of HBG offspring you might end up having in the pond. They eat snails, a vector for many fish parasites in ponds, thereby (greatly) reducing the incidence of grubs, etc. in our fish. They are a little longer for a given weight than BG, so HSB might find it slightly easier to swallow RES and lower their recruitment rate.

Virtually no RES is born with an inclination to eat pelleted fish food; you can train them to do so, but I don't think anyone is commercially doing so. An outgrowth of the no-pellet-feeding Con is that they are usually harder to find and higher priced than BG/HBG. They tend to eat farther down in the water than BG/HBG, so they may be harder to catch for many less experienced anglers (although fair direct comparisons are hard to come by, since they are usually outnumbered by BG in ponds due to their lower fecundity).