Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Golden Shiners or bluegills

It is much easier to first get shiners estabalished and then add bass. Lots of problems with this idea. From my experience with similar situations to yours, you will have a hard time getting gshiners established in the presence of a normal population of basically LMbass. Heavy weed cover would help them succeed but not much.

The main problem is the bass are already established at about carrying capacity. The more edible sized forage you dump in there the more the bass grow and become even more "healthy"/energetic thus causing more pressure on the shiners. Not enough shiners will survive and grow big enough to provide brood stock for next years shiner spawn. It takes about 3-4 yrs for a shiner to grow to 9" long.

However, it might(?) work in a weed infested pond where some shiners could escape predation until next years spawn. Shiners rarely get long and wide enough to be beyond the prey size of 16"-18" LMB. Thus they are constantly vulnerable to being easily eaten. If you stocked 9"-10 shiners the chances of this working improve somewhat, but not much. Extra large shiners for stocking are almost impossible to buy. Another thing you could do to improve chances of shiner survival is to dramatically reduce the LM bass numbers and add way too many shiners. A few might survive until the next spawn cycle. All options are very risky with out forage diversity and adequate weed cover. Structure does not provide adequate refugia for smaller sized "baitfish".

Systems with high diversity of forage items pull some of this predatory pressure off some gshiner populations where they succeed in ponds or small lakes.

What is so bad about bluegills?. The next issue of PondBoss mag Condello, Baird and Cody will have some ideas for managing bluegill so the population is skewed toward large 8"-10" bluegill.