Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Pond loaded with very small perch

In fall of 2021 I purchased land with a 2.25 acre pond in northern Penn.
the pond is:
• About 12’-13’ max depth flat bottom.
• No weed problem, water to me looks fine.
• It’s fed by a stream and I think a spring.
• My property is at 1600’ of elevation.

The I was told that years ago there were nice amount of largemouth bass in pond but there was no stocking and no winter aeration to protect them.

I did a little fishing in fall of 21 and caught only small yellow perch.

In the spring of 2022, I stocked with 200 Largemouth bass, 20 channel catfish, and (20 trout just to see if they last summer).

Since stocking I got a boat on pond and fished every weekend Late April into later October.

The problem is the pond seems over loaded with Yellow perch, on a normal day fishing out of every 4 fish I would get 3 perch and 1 sunfish.
In addition, bass were very rare to catch and only started being caught in September and October.

The bite in general was very light and to catch anything I had to keep downsizing hooks and using worms as bait. Even then the majority of the perch we between 4” -7” and sunfish were mostly 3” -5”

Any ideas what action I should take this year to help correct what I think is a pond overstocked with small yellow perch.

What size were the LMB and catfish you put into the pond? If they were small, they're gonna have to gro before they can make much of a dent.

apologies in advance that the forum software seems to be temperamental and on/off broken. Your uploaded pictures looks like it uploaded but it isn't there. We can't see it. I don't think it is your issue, up to the technical people to try to find a fix.

IN the meantime, how did the sunfish get in there? What type of sunfish? Were they there for years along with the YP? Hopefully when picture uploading works you can post pictures of your LMB, YP and your sunfish? The reason is we can tell a lot by the appearance of the fish (their body size, their head size, the shape of their body, their eye diameter etc) I would think your pond size and depth should be adequate to prevent winter kill if it truly is 12-13" deep. If there is plenty of vegetation in the pond which I assume there would be in a mature pond, then there should be adequate warm water refuge at that depth to avoid winter kill.

Sometimes it helps to take a plumb line and probe the depths and remeasure the actual depth. Silting action can take a couple feet off the 'deepest' spot fairly quickly and it is harder to prevent against winterkill in a 9-10' depth rather than 12-13' depth.

Of all the fish, the LMB should have the best chance of surviving. There presumably is tons of small sunfish and YP so they should have plenty to eat. Perhaps the catfish are eating the small LMB depending on stocking sizes as suggested by Theo above. I don't know if the LMB had time or adequate maturity to pull off a spawn but you usually can see balling up clouds of young LMB in the shallows.

What about 'minnows' any other shiners or fatheads or similar minnows visible?

If you have time and energy you could open a Imgr or Flickr account and upload future pictures there and then use their bulletin board paste tool to bring the link back here and the pictures should show up. There is a thread in the active list about hosting pictures that gives better directions.

I agree with Theo, what size were the bass and channel cats that were stocked last Spring?

The fish i stocked were best I could find locally the hatchery listed sizes were

Bass 6"-8" Catfish 8" trout 6" -8"

to me the they look smaller but I did not check with ruler.

the few bass i got late in the fall were about 8" they seemed health.

I have no idea what type of sun fish they are or where when they entered the pond.

the pond is over 70 years old. I found it on maps back to the mid 1950.

To post pictures to the forum you will have to use an image hosting service like imgur then under "share codes" copy/paste the BBC code here if you want others to see your pictures.

The bass will have to grow to roughly 10"-12" before they will be able to eat the 4"-7" Yellow Perch. So, you won't see a reduction in the Perch for about 2 years.

I will try and set up a a Flick account but there is not a lot of photos to post.

I'm not one for taking pictures, I went through my phone and only have 2 pictures of fish one small bass and one small perch.

if i did this right here are photos of lake through year and my only 2 fish pictures

https://www.flickr.com/photos/197723803@N06/albums

The bass looks to be in good shape.

Follow the instructions in this post from the active thread titled **Adding Photos to Forum** in the right hand side bar to get your Flickr hosted picture to embed right in line with your message.

If I follow the instructions I can get your picture to embed below. Not so hard now that you went through the work of hosting them on Flickr. Just be sure you don't use the full page editor and the post picture workflow. Just grab the full path of the link from Flickr using the BBcode option and paste it right below your message and it will work


image by Paul Astarita, on Flickr

thanks