Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Help Crawdads Tunneling Around my Spillway

I'm in central OH and have a 1/3 acre pond that is on its' 3rd year. Looks great, fish are doing great, but...when I see blue water at the base of the spillway and in the creek, I know the crawdads have dug a tunnel around it again!

I can't find it until the pond level gets down to where the hole is. It's usually knocks about 6" off of the pond depth. Not the end of the world, but I still don't like it. When I find the hole I pour in some bentonite and/or pound a rock into it. That seems to help until the next time.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

What fish don't you have that would eat crawdads? No bass?

I wonder if you can stock a different species of crawdad to out compete them, but doesn't burrow?

Don’t mudbugs dig vertically, and not horizontally?

Hmmm, I actually have quite a few bass.

Interesting critters. We have two ponds one very old i am slowly cleaning and resigining a little.

1. Old pond (70+ years) 2 acre i am adding a dividing small burm-road between it. This pond is ranch run off feeding its overflow into a creek.

2. New pond about 2 acres 10 foot at the deepest semi-flood area and surrounded by creek on one corner. I got tired of mowing the weeds and wanted catch the run off on our back pasture. It was dug last year and the guy did not do the best job on building the dam. About 25 feet colapsed after our big Tx rain filled it up.

I have been adding more good clay from our old pond as i dig out the right side that is the neighborhood run-off. We had concerns of pesticides but as old as this is, its very established left side is 22+ feet deep the right side was 6" to 16" I have been digging it about 6ft to 10 feet hoping to be like pre-filter for run-off.. I need to add some sort of vulvert with a bridge on top of it. This pond as Lots of great fish. Largest last year was 27" white bass very mild not as good the big mouth we have.. We added three carp to help clean it up so far it has improved and I saw on of the carp after two years went from 7" to about 28 inches..

My main question is related to the new back pond relates to this blog, crawfish and spillway. Our New back pond we had to stop digging at 9 feet because the ground got spongy for 1/3rd of the pond. More building up a dam than digging. I gues it was aquaifir. the Creek is about 100 yards away on the back side. We also had tons of crawfish holes show up the next day when when we stopped. It has been slowly trying to fill up again. I really don't want to spend much money on this one I added some gravel patches and a few trees. Keep it as back pasture fishing swimming pond from run-off. I need to add a good spillway. I am thinking about finding some manmade limestone stacking them the with of my excavator bucket then some cheap rock on the backside feeding into the natural property drain feeding into the creek. All advice is appreciated . You can see by googling 49 black jack rd huntsville Tx. This property was mess when we bought it. Weeds all around 5 to 6 feet..Used to be nice cattle farm. I have cross fenced and mow it twice a year.