jb - Numbers to stock per acre will depend on who you talk to and each will give you a different answer. Here's mine.
1. For stocking a new pond for a first years production without predators the first year: 400-600 breeding sized fish per acre. (Densities can be as high as 1000/ac.) This 400-600 rate can pretty easily result in 18,000+ shiners per acre (200 lb/ac w/out feeding) . There are about 100 (3.5"-3.7")shiners per pound. Fry survival will depend on amount of plankton present at correct times during the hatching periods.
2. Personally I think it is a waste of money to try and get them established in a TYPICAL pond with LMB. If you add about 30 to 50 pounds of shiners per acre each year you might get a few to survive the bass predation. Depending. Rooted weeds covering 50% to 80% of the pond bottom would be enough cover to get a smaller initial stocking of shiners and their resulting offspring to survive. BUT this many weeds would also cause an overpopulation of bgill. A lot of the survivability success of stocked shiners will depend on how many bass you have present per acre to prey on them. Young bass (less than 13") will prey very heavily on shiners.
I think golden shiners work a lot better with SMB as predators. Here also, weeds are also paramount to shiner survival. SMB have smaller mouths and are not as prolific as LMB. Thus fewer young are being produced to prey on shiners. Shiners do not grow all that fast and even longer lengths are still fairly slender compared to a sunfish/bgill. Thus they stay an optimum forage width for fairly long.
Lots of things affect shiner survival regardles of the species of predator present.
