Marc, the pond looks great! It's amazing the number and kinds of creatures that will so quickly colonize or just make use of a new pond. Very cool! If you do seine it, I'd love to know how the bluntnose minnows are doing. I suspect they are in there, but difficult to distinguish from the fatheads. They have similar behavior. Bluntnose will likely school up and hang out in the shallows, especially if they are young. Check, especially, where the little creek flows into the pond. This is a likely place to find the BNM hanging out. In streams, young BNM can be found in water only an inch or two in depth, feeding on algae and whatever else is there. It's a refuge for them from predators. So the quillback didn't go in there? I'd think that they would be a good reservoir of forage as they spawn and the adults are too big to be picked off. It seems unlikely that they would overpopulate as their young should be pretty easy pickings for SMB or even YP. And they could be culled in the same way that the game fish would be culled. They will take a baited hook and can be seined. I understand that spotted suckers, Minytrema melanops, are better at reproducing in lakes and ponds. They can use vegetation as spawning medium similar to chubsuckers. I'm going to grow some spotted suckers next year for folks to try out. I also have a bead on some Lake Chubsucker brooders for next year too. If folks want those, let me know so I can plan for how many I might need to produce: jonah@jonahsaquarum.com

Mark