Love your enthusiasm, Mark!!

If you estimate the "carrying capacity" of a pond that size and start to distribute that biomass amongst the various species you may find that it doesn't leave room for many quality individual fish, especially if you have blue catfish.

I would love to see you achieve some of these goals, but be cautious about just adding lots of species and then trying to manage them into your dream pond.

An example would be as follows: It is probably mutually exclusive to manage for gizzard shad and trophy RES. Just those two species alone would be an administrative nightmare to get to work. Gizzard shad are huge biomass vacuums. If you are fortunate enough to get a self-sustaining population they will obliterate your zooplankton community. This in turn will limit your larger invertebrates, which will probably make it impossible to get trophy RES.

I'm not trying to put a damper on your dream because trust me I started out exactly like you. My 1 acre pond had 500 hybrid striped bass as well as bluegill, black crappie...heck I even had walleye, sauger and fatheads. I fed the heck out of 'em and had a blast for a little over a year. You may be able to guess the rest.

Anyway, we really want you to hang around. Your experience will be really valuable to all of us and we'll try to help you out.

Bruce

Holding a redear sunfish is like running with scissors.