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

At a nearby city lake that is managed by the conservation department, recent rains have sent water spilling over the dam. The creek downstream is swarming with clouds of inch-long BG and a few small GSF. The GSF are easy to sort from the BG.

What would be the risks associated with dipping out a couple hundred BG, carefully checking them to make sure they ARE all BG, and releasing them into a newly filled pond of an acre or so? The pond already has FH, GS and RE.

Risks:

Not getting all the GSF out. (not a problem if stocking LMB)

Transmitting a parasite or disease that the fish in the pond haven't been exposed to.

Transferring an invasive plant. For instance, European Water Milfoil can propagate by plant parts or by seeds.

Is it legal to do so? (some states have bag/posession limits, and I've heard that others consider wild fish to be property of the state - state fish = pond open to the public.) Indiana was like that years ago. If the state stocked your pond for free, then it had to be open to anyone who wanted to fish it. That has since changed.

And, technically, those fish you stock from public waters into your pond are to be considered in your possession numbers.

I think it's legal. BG are considered nongame fish, here, and you can net up to 150 of them per day, as long as they are less than 5 inches long.

This is a wet-season creek, so it will dry up in a few days or weeks, and these fish will all die.

Too late to avoid the plant risk. I've dipped a couple hundred crayfish (Orconectes virilis) from local creeks, including that one, in recent weeks and added them to the pond.

The disease risk concerns me. Does the disease risk decrease considerably when you buy your fish from a hatchery? There's a truck from Arkansas coming up here in about 10 days. Maybe I should wait for it.

The disease risk is always there no matter the source. However, reputable sources certainly reduce that risk greatly. There are many diseases, parasites, infections and other nasties, some of which are very hard to see on fish until late in the infection stage.

For the price you'd pay for BG wait. It's not like BG aren't easy to source and fairly cheap in price. To me it is just not worth the risk.

Yeah, I see the point. No overflow bluegill. Thanks.

If you have tanks you can always quarantine them and treat them for parasites. Before I had my own pond I would catch different sunfish for my aquariums and I would quarantine and treat them for diseases and parasites as a precaution before placing them in my display tanks

+1

BG are cheap. Get good genetics from reputable source not worth the risk IMO.

Now Henry is probably right in terms of going to a hatchery to get good genes