Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Raising Forage and Bait Memo to Cecil on fish management:

Cecil,

I now have a better understanding of your signature. Last night, I put a couple of pounds of fatheads in a prototype overwintering system that I'm playing with...managed to kill all but a handfull.

Somehow those FHs piled up at the filter intake, clogged the lines, and burned out the pump....result about two pounds of dead fatheads.

Note to DD: Fatheads may survive a nuclear holocost but they couldn't survive one night in my system.

That's why I always do prototypes and simulations before scaling up something new....back to the drawing board.

Welcome to my world.

Medowlark,

If it makes you feel any better I never thought I'd kill any fish. I thought as long as one used common sense they shouldn't kill fish. Wrong! It finally happened to me this year. I moved about 70 female yellow perch up to just under 2 pounds to one of my 1/10th arce ponds. I thought the set up would be fine as it was a flow through pond and the water temp would stay optimal all summer (it did too). But I'm not sure what happened as I am presently draining the pond and there is not ONE SINGLE ONE in the pond! I knew something was wrong when I just didn't get the feeding response I wanted. What's really weird is I only had two floaters and I only found two carcasses.

A two legged predator is very unlikely as it's really close to the back of the house and I'm almost always here. Fish easting birds wouldn't be a problem as the pond is steep sided and not wadeable by herons, and I've never seen any other predator birds there. No sign of mink or otters either. Only two possibliities as they died they swan into the chara, and that's why they didn't float up and have decomposed by now, or they swam out of the overflow pipe. The overflow pipe has been screened 99 percent of the time and even in the brief periods it was not screened I can't believe all of the perch hightailed it out of there all a once. They are typically bottom oriented anyway and I've never seen them shallow enough to swim out of the overflow unless they did it at night.

My educated guess is they died from a combination of old age, spawning stress, to high a density, and refused to go back on the pellets so they perished.(I'm convinced most of them went off the pellets in the previous pond).

How long would a YP skeleton last under water? I really have no idea. CC skeletons hold up fairly long (months) above ground, after the buzzards are finished.

ML, sometimes the posts here make me smile; yours made me laigh out loud.

Uh, I've done that without a technology breakdown.

ML I know the feeling. On one of my tests I killed 750 3-5in BG before they were paid for ( 2 days).

Yeah, but do you still kill as many fish as you use to?
I have three ponds, have several troughs, and now three in-barn tanks plus an aquarium in the house. I transfer fish from one place to another quite often and haven't killed but a few in the last two years. I LOVE POND BOSS!

I hear ya, bro.