My opinions on your situation as an "all male" bluegill pond.

1. You'll likely find it hard to overstock a pond like this with all male bluegill. It's time consuming to carefully check all fish and you might even find that you'll lose enough fish to annual mortality than what you'll be adding.

2. You will probably never have great bluegill fishing if your goal is to have lots of action.

3. You WILL probably grow bluegill so big that they won't fit in the bottom of a five gallon bucket.

4. You can determine maximum stocking numbers by evaluating body condition of bluegill you are catching and comparing it to catch rate. i.e. If you aren't catching many fish and their Wr's are 125-130 you can probably continue adding fish.

Let the fishery teach you about what it will support. In theory if you overstocked, I'd think your catch rate will go way up and your fish's body condition will sag. If this is the case then just keep catching them and keeping the smaller ones.

My 1.25 acre pond has over 500 bluegill in it and the body condition of my fish is stupendous. Only problem is that I have to work pretty hard to catch a half dozen fish in an hour. The good news---two of the six will be big enough to send to a taxidermist. Late last year I was lamenting my low catch rate, until I looked in my logs and realized I'd caught 15 trophy bluegill in my pond in 2005.


Holding a redear sunfish is like running with scissors.