Ponduke, yes leaf detritus is a favorite for tilapia to consume! BUT, I'll make the assumption that at 70 years old, you pond has a lot of predators. This situation may make stocking tilapia a futile effort in muck reduction.

If your ponds have not been well managed over the years and they have lots of stunted apex predators, it may take an unreasonably high stocking rate to clear significant amounts of detritus. The cost of a complete renovation and restocking may well cost you less.

If your pond has a balanced population with few, but larger apex predators, 100 pounds of mixed sex tilapia would most likely make a very significant reduction in the depth of detritus.

There are a lot more variables that enter in to the best equation for stocking tilapia to make any solid suggestion.

Tilapia are eating machines, but larger ones spend a large amount of time spawning instead of eating. It's the vast number of mouths on the extremely fast growing offspring born about every 3 weeks that make the biggest impact on detritus and plant reduction in ponds stocked annually. In a pond with many predators of any kind, few offspring make it past 2 inches long before getting eaten.

You will have to overwhelm predators with enough adult tilapia in order to produce more offspring than your predators can eat to get dramatic reduction in much depth.


I also need to mention tilapia will eat what THEY want, not just what we want them to eat. If you have plants that you want to keep AND you want dramatic reductions in muck....forget about anything green as it will disappear in short order with high tilapia stocking rates.

Last year a customer in Shelbyville Ky. stocked 600 3-5 inch tilapia in a one acre pond with NO OTHER FISH PRESENT for duckweed control. The tilapia did not keep up with the duckweed, but after heavy runoff and wind flushed the duckweed out of the pond, the tilapia were able to prevent it's return. This pond owner does not care about the pond other than for aestethics and rarly looks at it up close. When cool weather hit and he noticed wildlife eating dead tilapia, he went to inpect his pond. The water was crystal clear and had never been more than 4 feet deep...filled with detritus. He told me he looked at the pond and was amazed to see a red clay bottom everywhere...not a black "muck" patch in sight! He got in his boat and was unable to reach the bottom with his paddle anymore and estimated the depth at over 8 feet now. He went with only 10 pounds this year in hopes to keep duckweed from returning and for insect control.

In my opinion, without seeing your pond first, your BEST solutions for removing the detritus would be either a complete renovation, or adding a QUALITY aeration system. Adding tilapia annually would greatly speed the breakdown of the detritus with an aeration system where predators are present.