Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Hybrid Crappie

Anybody have any experience stocking these along with BG/LB? Pros and Cons please? Also stocking rates?

I have no experience with hybrid crappie but stocked black crappie with BG LMB and after 5 years I have very few BCP left due to large bass and tons of BG that are stopping the BCP spawn by eating the eggs......

Also no experience

TJ has some knowledge of hybrid crappie.. I know our SW KS biologist has stocked a couple hundred acre lake with them which is not the same as a pond setting but I know they are not reproducing as expected.. very very few recruits in the last 6 yrs.

I'm guessing TJ will chime in, but I believe his experience is very similar.

Sure wish all the old links worked. Lots here on crappie.

Try this one to start - it works.

https://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=13896&fpart=1


From CJ's link - photo courtesy of Jim Negus or John Hammonds .

Douglas Reservoir Tennessee white, hybrid, and black crappie

My limited first hand experience involves creating and rearing them. Cross easy to make and goes both ways through natural spawning. Hybrids do not grow faster than pure parents, but they make keep growing once they reach upper size range for crappie. The are not sterile. Overall, I see no advantages to them. They can be problematic in distinguishing from pure Black Crappie if marketing in any numbers for stocking.

We stocked 100 Hybrid Crappie in a pond of mine December 7 2023. They were 2.5 to 3.5 inches long most of them 3 inch. I have seen a few, and I have seen them eating pellets with the bream early in the morning and sometimes see a few in the evenings eating pellets. They appear to be 6 to 7 inches but I cannot catch them. I had one that got off on road runner at the bank. He looked 7 inches or so. We tried green lights at night ( minnows). We tried minnows in the day and no luck. Anybody got a suggestion on how to catch them. I just want to put my hands on one to measure and look over.

We are going to try minnows and jigs at daylight in the morning. They appear more active early in the morning pond is only around 1/2 to 2/3 acre so one would think with 100 in there you could catch one!

If they are feed trained, you can try pellet look-a-likes, such as Stubby Steve's, Berkley Power Eggs, or the dreaded pompom fly. Chumming with feed pellets usually works best, but avid pellet feeders may strike without chumming first.

You may not be fishing deep enough, in my pond they seem to be real deep, even more so then in other ponds that I have caught them in, especially Black Crappie, if you can find some deep brush, let your lure drop down deep next to it.

I have read on the forum of turning off the feeder for a few days and that makes the subsequent fishing better. (I suspect that is true, but don't know how long you could turn it off before you would start to weaken their good habit of eating at the feeder?)

Also, do you have a good spot near the feeder to sink a few cedar trees in deeper water that does not negatively impact any of the OTHER things you do in that area of the pond? I think having a fish "concentrator" near the feeder would make it easier to just catch one or two crappie so you could sample your population.

Don't turn the feeder off. Fish with these 20 minutes before the feeder goes off.

https://stubby-steves-fishing-lure....-brown-artificial-fish-food-fishing-lure

Thanks for the help, I feed by hand each day and have tried feeding and not feeding. Aerator on and off. I have pallets with cinder blocks and plastic pipes in them in several places. But I do not have any brush per say. Hope that going at daylight with it being hot will help. I got some of those Berkley power eggs to try. I have been using crappie nibbles on a jig with and with out a cork. I will try to go deeper in the morning again thanks for the help. I stocked 100 speckle bellies the same day December 7 2023 and I catch them every time I fish. From what I had read expected them to be more aggressive. Buddy of mine says, one day you will just start catching them, he said it was 6 months before he ever saw them, and nearly a year before he caught one.

I put BC into my pond, and the first time I was completely sure that there were none in it, fished really hard for a yr and never seen one, so I put another batch in, a little bigger this time, because the LMB already had a yr of growth on them so didn't want all of them to get eaten, still never caught a single one for over 6 to 8 months, fishing hard and often, was getting frustrated, all of a sudden one day I caught one and been catching them regularly every day, pretty much the same technique I had been using for two yrs, never did figure out why they all started biting at the same time. I can go out now and catch a dozen crappie in the same spots where I couldn't catch anything 8 months ago.

Including after they started biting I caught several of the original ones too, they were almost 1 1/2 lb and 14.5 to 15 inches, the second stocking couldn't have gotten that big yet.

I have caught thousands and thousands of Crappie in 15 different ponds and lakes over the years, and while I know that every BOW is different as to what color and style of lure to use, have never figured that one out but its fact, but nothing I tried in my pond worked, till all of a sudden I can catch them on a number of different colors.

I catch 95% of my Crappie on Charlie Brewers crappie sliders, and Strike King panfish jigs. with home made jig heads, 3/32 or 1/4 oz. i am having to use the weed brush guards built into my jig heads because of the huge amount of brush and brush piles in my pond, and they are right by or in the brush too. but then thats where I been looking for them all along, its not like I just started fishing the brush. and the warmer the water gets you gotta fish the deep brush.

We finally started catching them this weekend early in the morning on minnows. And road runners. It appears that the half that are eating pellets are 7 to 7.5 inches and healthy. The ones that are not eating pellets are 5 to 5.5 inches and very thin. Is there anything I can do to feed the ones that are not eating pellets? It was just nice to see them about half of them have black nose and other half did not. The pellet eaters looked blacker or darker than the smaller ones.

I have them in my less than .5 acre pond. Stocked 75 of them in May of 2022. I have them ranging from 6-9" and haven't seen any yet that are at a good relative weight. Most seem slim, the larger ones eat pellets but incredibly slowly. I have a strong population of GSH and some SFS as well, so they may just be outcompeted by my HSB and YP. I haven't seen much recruitment, which is what I was hoping for.



You can see my thread here https://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=567506&page=3

I feed them Optimal Blue Gill twice a day. Is there a sinking or 50/50 pellet or food that I could mix in the crappie that are not taking pellets? I could mix them with Optimal.

There is some variations of sinking feed.

Many believe that any given fish is more likely to take to a sinking feed as it resembles the path of other food sources. Also meaning that we can't see if the feed is taken in many situations.

What would you all get?

Try mixing different feeds (quality ones) to see what works best.

Get Optimal Starter #4. Some floats, some sinks.