Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Should I stock Golden Shiners?

I'm debating on whether I should stock golden shiners in my pond or not. For some reason in my area (Central Texas) I'm not hearing of many people who put them in their ponds. Typically, the stocking schedule is just FHM, BG, RES and LMB. My pond is about 1.75- 2 acres which is going to be a high catch rate LMB pond. I do have a shallow section which adds almost another 1/2 acre of surface to the pond, however it averages around 12" deep and is fully anticipated to dry up each year (so this is not included in the 1.75-2 acres). I have heard some cons that they like to eat eggs, however it seems like the pros are that they will actually be able to stick around unlike the FHM. Headed to pick up more fish soon and can't make up my mind on this.

Thanks,
David

As far as golden shiners (GSH) eating fish eggs, many species of fish eat fish eggs such as trout, bluegill, sunfishes. yellow perch, most minnow species on and on with others who eat fish eggs. Your shallow areas are good areas for spawning of GSH. It takes a pretty big LMB to eat a full grown GSH as 10"-12" long. Big bass anglers in Florida use large GSH as a favorite bait. If you want to grow LMbass then I would stock GSH and give them some good habitat to thrive. Because you are in TX the other good forage fish you should consider using for growing bass is the threadfin shad (TFS). As a side note the RES in my opinion have little benffit for growing bass because they are not a prolific spawner. RES benefit is they eat snails and help minimize parasites in the fish fillets. If I lived in TX and wanted to grow good numbers of LMB I would stock both GSH and threadfins. Then when using a correct harvest and proper fish numbers management this will help you toward achiving your specific goals, There are many ways to grow bass depending on ones GOALS for what type of bass fishery is desired.

There have been numerous discussions here about using GSH as a forage fish. They do have Pros and Cons and their usage depends on ones pond management goals.

TFS will die off during the winters in "middle states" ponds. During very cold winters, they will even die off in north Texas ponds.

However, I (non-expert) think you are far enough south that cold will probably not kill them off in your pond.

I might start with TFS for sure, and then you could add GSH later if you determined you need them.

The TFS prefer open water, so they will be in a different food niche for bass than the BG.



P.S. I don't think anyone ever went wrong following Mr. Cody's advice.

Golden Shiners are more of an open water fish, and will feed bigger bass than TFS just because the adults get bigger than TFS. If it was my pond and the goal was to grow big bass, I'd stock both. The Shiners will be a buffer in case the temps drop and the TFS die back.

Thanks for the advice. I went to the fish farm yesterday and I got the remaining golden shiners they had left, which was only a little over 1 lb. of the smaller ones. Not sure how many I need to establish a population but it seems like they will have at least a year to do so. Plus I tossed them in with another 5lbs of FHM so I'm going to assume the bass will target them first before taking on the faster GSH.

As for the threadfin shad, I probably incorrectly had several assumptions as to why they wouldn't work in my pond. Although the biggest reason right now is the cost. Looks like I would have to bring them in on a fish truck which is going to be pretty costly and I'm already way over budget on this build. At this point I'm trying to figure what the best bang for my buck is to allocate the few dollars I have remaining.

I haven't followed your progress or pond situation, but it sounds like this is a new stocking ? I stocked 6# of GSH in my 5 acre pond 11/1/23, 2 months after the initial stocking of BG and LMB, 20 months later I have a pond full of GSH, some upwards of 9" long. They will reproduce and do amazing things if they have cover and places to spawn. I also have SMB and HSB so its not like they don't have a solid predator base to pick them off

My GSH story:

In April 2002 I stocked 20 lbs of GSH (and another 20 lbs of FHM) in a newly filled 2/3 acre pound. BG, HBG, RES, CC, and LMB were stocked in May 2003. The year long head start let the forage fish produce incredible numbers of offspring.

By 2005 I had decided I wanted to concentrate on growing large BG, and decided to remove GSH so that the LMB would have to feed more on BG and reduce their numbers. I pulled 552 GSH out of the pond that year by angling - GSH were still quite present at that time. GSH numbers were down after that, as I only caught 75 in 2006 and 11 in 2007.

I feel GSH are valuable starting forage if you want to grow large bass. They also might have a place in a pond where sheer fish catching was the emphasis, as they are quite catchable.

Yes, this is a newly constructed pond with no reliable source of water other than rainfall and unfortunately in central Texas over the last three years, rainfall hasn't been that reliable. Now before building the pond we spent a good deal of money on engineers that calculate waterflow and all of them said that we should be fine with this size of lake and could even go larger however budget was the limiting factor on the size. From my observations on how this lake filled up, I'm pretty concerned that the water volume is going to change pretty rapidly. While it may be a 2.5 acre lake when full, we may average more around 1.5 acres over the summer. So for the golden shiners, it seems like they have the perfect habitat right now and hopefully we get a spawn in this year. However if the water level drops their shallow water will mostly disappear. My only concern with them is that if they do grow to 12" then the population could potentially get a little out of control if the bass are unable to eat them but I also didn't know that they were catchable, so that kind of solves that problem if I can pull them out that way.

Here is something to do with the excess larger shiners that you catch by hook and line.
Search YouTube for Hand Fed Monster Bass.
as posted by Shiner Sam.

Note you can also do this to train your larger bass to eat any smaller excess hand fed fish from your pond or another pond. It usually takes some patience and some persistance by doing this for several days to a week to get the bass to appreaciate the welfare they receive.