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

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).