The Good News - I've now got SFS, FHM, BNM, and a few papershell crayfish introduced into my pond. Average depth is now about 10', with the exception of a deeper hole in one corner. The SFS appear to be spawning nicely on the CD stack spawning devices per the idea Mr. Cody provided me (see pic).
The Bad News - Just as I got done putting in the FHM and some pallets, I noticed something larger than a minnow in the corner of my eye. I came back a couple weeks later and my kids and I caught 19 small fish (GSF I think). One of them was full of eggs with one of my minnows inside. I was not a happy camper. (See fish pics).
Am I SOL from the start having GSF already? I can't believe anything survived our pond dig, but I guess that's my fault for not taking more precautions. I really don't want to have to rotenone the pond since I've got about 12 hours of driving and additional time/moneuy invested in getting my forage base started. With my goal of a YP/SMB pond, is there any benefit to maybe adding some larger SMB earlier than I intended to try to inhibit the GSF population? Or will that just wreck my YP plans?
Even though we caught 19 GSF, it took us an hour. I'd say every 5 min or so we'd catch one, most of them were small. And by catch I mean one bit the hook, not that they kept biting the whole time and we just couldn't hook them. We had a small hook so we hardly lost any that nibbled.
One more question, are all the fish in the attached pictures actually GSF? I need to get better at panfish identification...
