Vertical side areas will deteriorate by sloughing to become gradual slopes. It ususally does not take very long compared to the life of the pond. It happens in almost every clay bottom pond that I deal with. To maintain those vertical walls they somehow need to be reinforced to maintain the vertical shape.
Increasing the numbers of stockers toward the numbers as suggested by Sunil is good for a 1 acre pond. I prefer for a new YP-SMB stockings to have a 10%-25% of the YP to be 4"-6" rather than all at 2"-4".
As noted by Theo, your YP will IMO use the deep structures for egg laying more than shallow shoreline areas. This limits the number of egg ribbons that can be removed to minimize overpopulated YP. An abundant population of SMB can help a lot to minimize too many small perch. However this also results in too few minnows as the structure of the carrying capacity changes with time. Once you add the predators the minnow community will very rapidly decrease especially after the first couple of predator spawnings. As noted adding golden shiners after the first year may help maintain long term more numbers of the minnow/shiner populations.
Normally in your type of planned fishery in many ponds situations, the RES will eventually gradually decrease in number after a few years to you very rarely ever catching one. Good amounts of deeper structure may help better maintain RES numbers.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 06/15/26 03:37 PM.
