Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Raising Forage and Bait Yellow grub in fathead minnow pond

2 years ago we stocked fathead minnows into a five acre duck marsh with the hopes of being able to trap our own minnows to stock into largemouth and smallmouth bass grow out ponds. In the first year we had no issues with yellow grub but this year our minnows are very abundant but infested with the yellow grub parasite. It is not really feasible to keep the herons away with any sort of deterrent to my knowledge and the snail population is now abundant. Our plan is to stock redear sunfish this fall with the hope of lowering the snail population and over time getting rid of at least some of the yellow grub. Our worries are that the redear sunfish are going to eventually take over with the absence of predators in the pond and we will not be able to trap a large number of minnows. I know that minnows are not the primary food source for redear sunfish but will they still eventually decimate the minnow population?

We are also concerned about whether or not to feed the parasite ridden fish to the bass we are growing out. I would say the majority of the minnows have the grub on them and some are absolutely covered in it. I did not think it transfers fish to fish but will there be negative effects on our bass if we trap and stock minnows that are covered in the grub into the grow out ponds as forage? We were counting on this additional forage to supplement our grow out ponds but do not want to cause harm to the bass. Would appreciate any insight or advice!

Not my pond. But, if it was, I would rotenone the whole thing and start over. The infestation will not go away.

I never did a tank study with Redears and FHM, but Bluegills are very effective FHM predators. I suspect Redears would like eating them as well.;

Here is a Pond Boss thread directly about transferring parasites.

Scroll down to the second post. (Bill Cody was giving me advice in a PM thread, but he let me post it to the forum.)

Transferring Parasites


The thread then goes on to discussing how to exclude wading birds from forage and grow-out ponds - which obviously is NOT applicable to your situation of a duck marsh.

I do have some guys around me that run duck marshes/ponds. It is usually below their main pond, so they let it dry every year and then fill it at the right time for the plants to be perfect for duck season.

Two things come to mind.
1) IF the pond is a duck pond, i.e. for puddle ducks, then it's shallow. Fatheads can survive the winter, but maybe NOT the RES because the water will be too cold in the winter.
2) Go ahead and stock the FHM in the main pond. BUT, make sure you have a good population of RES in the main pond. The FHM shouldn't transfer the grubs directly to the bass, they get transferred to a wading bird when eaten. If the snails are controlled in the main pond, the infestation won't be re-occurring there. i.e. a grub doesn't go from fish to fish.

Also, the FHM will only be big enough to sustain LMB up to about 8"-9", bigger bass need to eat larger fish to make up for calories expended in catching the forage fish.

RES WILL eat FHM, but they also eat snails. so I'd stock them in the forage pond. You could always use "Z" traps in the duck pond, and catch RES too to transfer to the main pond.

Interesting stuff! I wonder if the salt bath would be beneficial to do on fathead minnow loads before stocking into grow out pond! Not sure if it would make any difference or not on these parasites but could be interesting to try.