Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose fish

Cecil - post a picture of some of your YP that you've grown in your small ponds.

Grant - keep in mind that a 5 lb CC can eat as many fish per year as a 5 lb LMB, sometimes more since the CC could be growing faster than the LMB. We had a local 1/3 ac YP pond with only YP and 6 CC. CC were keeping YP in balance due to predation. CC can be efficient predators espically on YP since they rest at dark on the bottom. The pond owner had a very hard time getting the big (30"+) CC out since they were eating too many 6"-8" YP. He had to resort to shooting the CC.

Generally speaking the fewer SMB you put in the pond the faster they will grow "to a point". 100 smb per acre is on the high side and if most survive, IMO they should be reduced to 50-60 per ac or fewer if you want them to grow to trophy size - 18"-19"+. Remember as those 50 bass get to 16" there will also be numerous smaller bass present due to recruitment.

If you want trophy YP in a pond with SMB (or other predators) then IMO you should use pellet trained YP. In a pond with SMB it will be difficult to grow numerous jumbo YP due to the competition factor for preyfish from the other predators such as SMB-CC-WE and maybe HSB. SMB & CC are more aggressive fish predators than YP. Without pellet feeding the YP are likely to not get enought natural foods to grow optimally to large sizes of 12"-14". Done correctly (pellet feeding) and in a pond as small as 1/3 ac, one can grow numerous YP (10"-14") that allows for an annual harvest of 25-40 YP (75-120/ac). However this scenario does not allow the presence of 60-125/ac larger predators (10"-16") each eating 125-200 small YP per year. Do the math; minimally that is around 7500 small fish and this does not include YP eating fish. That is a lot of YP to be loosing per year to predation and them being unavailable to move into the harvest size range of 8"-14" YP. A supplimental forage fish should probably be present to sustain the prey base. For a sizable harvest per year there has to be ample numbers in the smaller size classes of well fed rapidly growing fish to "fill the ranks" of harvested fish.