Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Alternative Pond Forage

esshup I will do that, thanks so much.

do they sell them by the pound?
how many do you think is a conservative
amount to order for a 4 acre pond?

Yes, by the pound. As for an amount, I'd make sure you have ample habitat for them. Large rocky areas (like riprap) for them to hide in or they won't survive long.

IIRC the client stocked 5#/ac without enough habitat and very few have been observed. One pond that didn't have any fish predators, when drawn down, didn't show any signs of the papershells. I'm thinking turtles got them due to no habitat to hide in.

Ok thank you. I do need to add riprap anyway.

I caught a scualpin while running a trap line once (had a trout poll along) and rigged it up on a 110 conibear. Had a rat in it the next day.

On the Brook stickle backs, I have poor luck with them when I use them for bait. But in North Dakota they seem to be very popular. A new pond I have been playing on have a LARGE population of brook sticle backs. and I am tempted to uae them for bait, and they will undoubtly be forage for the WE SMB RES an YP going in.

any one learn much about the smaller stickle back, are they three spine or 5 spine?

Some ponds here have them and they seem ahfull bony and small, but you can see several hundreds swimming around in schools.

Euopean rudd?? I have read that southern bait growers mix them with GS to get more size and it breeds out the pre natal gene that makes GS females less fertile as they get older. just what i ahave read...

The rudd is illegal here but our state record is over a pound.

Never read that about rudd before. GSH do have issues with fertility as they get older but that is caused by a parasite, not cross breading with rudd.

Mark, why are you ordering from NY instead of AR or SE Texas? Is there some advantage to them?

Dave they were the only source I knew about for paper-shells. Red-swamps are much easier to come by in and around Texas, but they have a bad rap. In my searches I found paper-shells somewhat hard to come by...some sellers I ran across that had them would show "out of stock" or they didn't ship them, or if they delivered them there was some large minimum total order. What sources do you know about where I could get say $500 worth of paper-shells shipped and/or delivered to my pond? The shorter the distance the better.

At one time I contacted some Louisiana crawfish farms on the www. They were all willing to ship them to me. Or, you could just drive down and pick them up. You're not that far.

ZEP, have you found any other sources for papershells or are you still going with Smith Creek in the next few months? I'll be very interested to hear how the shipment turns out.

As a fur trapper I can tell you for a fact muskrats love fish, its a very good bait to lure them with, they mostly hunt and eat fish in winter when vegetation is sparse and the fish move slower. Foxes do fish, they will wade out in shallow water and wait for an unsuspecting fish, they will try to either snatch it with teeth or swat it to the bank with a paw