well, we talked with the folks at Anderson about the "where" and they said that it wouldn't matter because these little suckers will be all over the pond in less than 24 hours. But, we still stocked them in 4 different areas that had plenty of cover and flooded grass - pretty shallow and lots of places for them to hide.
We do have a slight plankton bloom.
Keep in mind that we have never seen our pond in April or May. I first set eyes on this pond last June and we bought the property a few months later. So, we don't even know what is "normal" in terms of plankton or algae blooms, here.
One thing that we noticed, and several of you on this forum also noted and pointed out, our fish have been skinny. Long and thin. Based on observations, we had not seen more than a couple of BG and virtually no other "minnows" or other small fish until this past month. We seem to have a few BG fry and at least one BG nest. We've had some early LMB spawners and have seen a few fry. Our crappie are full of eggs - we've been fishing the heck out of them trying to thin them out but, I'm sure that's basically futile.
Anyway, those Arkansas shiners are just "bait store minnows" that we've been using to catch crappie. We've been catching and cleaning (culling) a bunch of crappie and small LMB and finding a lot of those shiners in their bellies. That's what makes us think that those shiners may be reproducing but we can't really confirm.
We are such ROOKIES at this but the learning has been super fun!
