Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Crappie Question

So, I bought a house with a small pond. 100ft by 200ft and 16 ft deep. The only thing we have caught out of it are blue gills. 10 inch blue gill seem to be plentiful. Anyway, so a couple days ago my brother calls and says he just caught a 9 inch crappie and 15 inch bass and he asked if I wanted them. I said sure, drop em in the pond.

Fast forward to tonight and I'm have a mini panic attack after stumbling across all these threads about how I don't want crappie in my pond.

it's only one fish, whats the worst that could happen? Can one fish spawn or do they need the male/female combination. Obviously I'm not a biologist. It is August here in Michigan. I read the crappie spawn pretty early so hopefully it's not full of eggs or something crazy.

My plan is to try and catch it. I just was curious though on how quickly things can get out of control in my little pond. I think I need to get my research done before I keep adding random fish.

Welcome TheBeard! You won't have to worry about single fish as they externally breed. For further reference though, please don't "bucket stock" again as it is bad for disease and unwanted fish, i.e. crappie. Finally, if your pond is full of 10 inch gills don't mess with it by stocking as it is working right.

Thank you for the reply. I hadn't really considered the consequences of bucket stocking. Yes, the gills are nice but I still kinda want bass. I'll keep researching and maybe talk myself out of it.

Beard, I think you asked a great question, not a crappie one.

What I have seen many times is that you can have a small number of some type of fish in a pond that do not show through light angling. If another crappy of opposite sex present then you can have a spawn come off changing everything.

^^ What he said.

Case in point. I saw one 18"-20" channel catfish in a clients pond. It was bucket stocked, and we don't know how many were put in. Electro shocking the pond came up with 0 CC. Having a 50 hook trot line in the pond for a month, baited with commercial catfish bait, chicken livers, hearts,gizzards, cut up fish, and shrimp. Only thing caught was one snapping turtle and one 9" Bluegill on a chicken heart.

Question for the experts... Does the fact that there are alot of 10" BG in the pond indicate the presence of some predator?

Without more data, I would say yes.

Welcome Beard to the forum
As long as someone doesn't add an opposite sex crappie you should be fine. If you have read a lot on the forum you will hear it 'depends' term a lot, and I guess it does. I have a 5 Ac pond that is pushing 4 yrs old that has BG, LMB,BCP,CC, and BC in it . My crappie have not so far overpopulated in fact I don't hardly catch any this year, where previously you could catch dozens in an outing. I do have a large population of LMB of various sizes up to 6-7#.

The more data I would need includes the following; bluegill pure or hybrid, were fish taken off nesting area not reflecting average for population and how much fishing pressure does it get.

I havent fished it a ton. Mostly my brother and his son. They are obsessive fisherman. Just a light hobby for me I'm in the crowd. I do believe they were spawning around the time it was fished more heavy. I'm was fathers day weekend when the family was camping in my yard. I thnk I'm going to start fishing a little more so I can get a better feel for it. In the end, I want a nice fishing/swimming pond. At the moment I'm working on getting aeration ordered.