Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Orangespotted Sunfish

I am uncertain. The vertical bars do show some splotchiness which would suggest that some black crappie genes are there. Body shape, barring, spine count all point to a white crappie contribution. What other characteristics should we also consider to recognize black crappie genes and be certain the features are not variation within the white crappie species?


Buck, Homer, et al noted variation of spine counts from different ponds (and potentially 2 different crosses). One pond had 53% of the survivors sporting 6 spines. But between all ponds and all samples the hybrids with 7 spines comprised 92% of those surviving. There is also variation of spine counts within a species (though no black crappies were noted to have 6 spines). They described hybrids as looking similar to blacks as opposed to looking like whites. So the water seems kind of muddy to me.

Going to bump this to keep my OSS journey all together. We moved this March to a new place with a 1.25 acre pond that already has an established population of LMB and BG. Lots of little bass that I've been removing whenever I have a few minutes, BG population in turn is fantastic at the moment. We had all of the nieces and nephews out with my kids a couple weeks ago and all of the adults stayed busy helping release dozens and dozens of big healthy BG, many of them in the 9-10 inch range. Shame on me for not snapping pictures.

I found I have a very small window to harvest OSS from the location referenced in the original post. Essentially if I found them moving up to spawn I could net a couple at a time for the pond. Very tedious work for the returns but I managed to stock a fair number for a pond that size. They only had 1 season in the little pond so I didn't get much by way of observation there.

Fast forward to yesterday, we found the motherload of all fish collecting areas last night. We've got flood waters up here and it created a small pocket of slack water along one of the dams nearby that is absolutely loaded with every species of prey fish you could think of. Took my 6 year old down there and netted probably 300 fish in total Shame on me again for not snapping photos, I know we had BG, GSF, OSS, GSH, BG, BNM, SFS, and a host of different creek species, mostly common shiners and chubs with a sampling of other species. It took longer to sort through for preferred species and health than it did to catch them. Of those, around 15-20 were OSS. I placed a couple of them in a netted area and released the others with a "good luck" as they ventured out into the LMB waters. The LMB were going nuts on some minnows that my son launched to their doom so hopefully the OSS had a chance to settle in and get hidden.

The DNR here logs "Bio Assessments" of fish species in different areas of the state. They have a site where they collect and report that is upstream from the marsh that drains through the area we were collecting. I note that they had a few Pumpkinseeds collected last fall at that site, so I wonder if I misidentified a few smaller pumpkinseeds as OSS when I was sorting. They don't look THAT much alike, but just enough that I'm questioning myself. I know for sure the first couple were OSS, but after that I was moving quickly so we could get them transported. It's possible that some portion of that 15-20 were not OSS. I'll have to get back there and see if I can catch a few to look at more closely.