Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Base of the Food Chain

Because you have GSH and depending on their density of the 4"- 7" GSH brooders, they usually dominate or frequent the deeper open water areas - known as the pelagic zone or open waters vs the littoral near shore zone usually containing the rooted vegetation. For reference - GSH reproduction begins in the spring when the water temperature reaches around 68ºF and continues for several months until the water temperature exceeds 81ºF. One pound of golden shiners as abt 40-60 of 4” is capable to produce around 500,000 eggs in a season. What happens to all those eggs from just one pound of brood sizes of GSH???

GSH are considered omnivorous as young fish and later mainly planktivores eating lots of zooplankton, microcrustaceans and any small insect larvae (lots of hatching midges) that they usually cherry pick from what are the edible sizes wherever they are feeding. The groups roam throughout the pond and small lakes feeding at the surface, mid-water or anywhere in the littoral zone where they find the current best buffet. As many at PB forum know, larger GSH will readily eat 1/8”-3/16” even sometimes ¼”pellets and even fish fry. Thus numerous items are fair game for the bigger sizes of GSH.

Back to your question “In my reading on various sites there was a reference or two that YP can or will put a pretty big dent in the base of the food chain (daphnia - water flea) and that could impact how well the other fish are able to pass the bottleneck in food as they grow.”

Several things will influence the “bottleneck” situation in a pond. 1. Number of hatchling YP, 2. Number of adult GSH, 3. Size or amount of zooplankton, 4. Clarity of the water.
Basically the intensity of the YP spawn and numbers of eggs that hatch as active weakly swimming fry, about the length of 4-6mm and the I on this page, will move to the open water where they do feed on the edible sizes of zooplankton starting with mostly planktonic rotifers and immature crustaceans. With lots of zooplankton the YP fry grow fast possibly 1mm/day. However, if the pond has a decent GSH population the adult shiners that frequent the open water zone will devoir or crop lots of YP fry and edible zooplankton depending on the density and sizes of adult shiners. IMO the Adult GSH are much faster and better swimmers compared to YP fry. Thus the adult GSH can also act as a significant “bottleneck” by consuming lots of pelagic zooplankton and the YP fry. I suspect that each adult GSH could easily eat if present 50 to 100 YP fry per day. If each GSH of 400 adult GSH eats just 50 fry per day that is a total loss of 20,000 YP fry per day and they as a group can significantly limit the recruitment of YP. I am not sure how big of a perch fry the GSH is able to catch and eat. YP fry usually stay in the open water zone until they are around 1” long (often around 30 days old) and then move back into the littoral zone to continue growing as fingerlings.

If you are really interested in this topic, then this spring hatch some YP fry in a bucket of aerated water and put a significant number (several 100 -1000) of the fry in a aquarium with a few GSH and watch what happens and report back here with your results. YP eggs will hatch in 7-12 days depending on temperature. To make the whole process easier and not have to deal with egg fungus problems allow an egg ribbon moved and draped onto a tree branch to continue developing naturally in the pond. All very white eggs are unfertilized and decaying. As the ribbon ages the yellow-cream colored eggs will darken (eyed stage) about 6-8 days after the spawn (50-55F). Then bring a portion of the ribbon into your aerated bucket of water and slowly raise the temperature to around 60-65F. Hatch should then occur quickly 1-2 days. Fry at hatching will first lay on the bottom for about 16-24 hrs then become active swimmers. Move lots of them (estimated number) into the aquarium with one or a couple GSH. Watch and learn and please report back with your results. This would be a good project to do with the kids - educational quality time.