Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Raising Forage and Bait Lake Chubsuckers Available

Probably lots of other forage species besides LCS that would be great food for thought/discussion on this forum and good food for the bigger fish as well.

I don't think all the emphasis or excitement is on the LCS per se, but just that it is exciting to have other options for forage, especially unique options that fill a special niche in the forage 'ladder'.

more FYI:


From Brian's newsletter:
Copyright © 2014 Zimmerman's Fish, All rights reserved.
We send this email to our customers who wanted to be informed about recent news on available fish, new species, or projects.

(he has given me permission to use although the pictures didn't reproduce, others may know how to get the pictures in, the blue nose shiner is very cool looking!)

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After a busy summer of breeding lots of fish, we are now harvesting the results. Some of our big successes for this year have been the bluenose shiners, tricolor shiners, and a large variety of sunfish again!

The bluenose shiners are very difficult to produce in captivity because of their need to breed in a sunfish nest. To our knowledge, we are only the second persons to successfully breed large numbers of this species. In our case we had them in a pond with a single pair of redear sunfish and a group of longear sunfish. There were 6 pairs of bluenose shiners that we very active all summer mostly over the redear nest. There were several potted plants in this 20’x20’ rubber lined pond, and this resulted in 300 young that are now currently 1-1.5’’. We tried an additional 6 pairs in a different pond with western dollar sunfish, and did not have any results. Overall, we are very happy with this success!


We also tried to breed several different species in our newly built outdoor stream. We put several cyprinids, darters, and brindled madtom catfish to start. We had great success with the tricolor shiners and started seeing young almost immediately. We think that the other species might have been placed in the stream a little too late for their breeding season to spawn. Now that things are in place, we predict that next year we will be able to start sooner for species that spawn in early spring. Hopefully we have more success with several darter species and many more minnows.


Once again we are successful with quite a few different sunfish species including a couple of new longear sunfish varieties. We had a strain from the Mobile River Basin in Alabama that display red and blue speckling on the body. We also attempted to breed a strain from the Blackwater River Basin from the Florida panhandle. This longear was less successful and only got a few young out of the pond. We hope to try them again next year for better results. This variety has an abundance of blue speckles all over resembling that of an extra-large dollar sunfish.

As for the other sunfish species, we had pretty good success with Missouri River Basin longear, green, western dollar, northern longear, bantam, redear, and raised redspotted sunfish for the first time in several years.
Lastly, we also raised some other odds and ends which included: lake chubsuckers, western banded killifish, pygmy killifish, russetfin topminnows, golden topminnows, starhead topminnows, gulf coast pygmy sunfish, least killifish, brown darters and iowa darters.

We still have a few ponds to clean out and harvest which may have blackbanded sunfish, central mudminnows, and banded sunfish. We strive to keep our website up to date with the sizes and species available, so keep your eye out for any new additions this fall.