Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - A new pond journal.. lets see where we go!

After asking a round of questions and getting some fantastic help I'm on my way for my new 1/2 acre pond project. (Thank you Bill Cody, Omaha, Sunil, Ewest, and Eshhup for your help!)

Here is where I'm headed: (YP, RES, HSB, SMB?, BCP or Hybrid Crappie?)

-Pond is 1/2 acre and deepest point is around 14'. It is dug out fairly deep and averages 8-10' I would imagine. I've got some structure in the pond including (sand, several rock piles under water, some tile, a small rock pier, and a few home made pvc type structures). I plan on adding a pile of cedar limbs as well here soon in a very shallow area for spawning purposes. I will be feeding the fish pellets as well as much as I can reasonably afford.

-I have 2" conduit preparing to be laid in a trench that is being dug for my new home construction. They are running the natural drain from my basement to the pond. I'll pull wire out here hopefully late summer and get prepared to install a bottom aeration system that helps turn the water over.

-In early March my hope is to do the following stocking
5lbs of FHM
50 4-6" RES (to help identify them and not get any GSF or BG)
20 8-10" YP (Hoping to pull off a spawn in year one)
60 3-4" YP

-I'm likely not to install aeration until 2023 as I can imagine I would only have power ready to go out there towards early fall of 2022 so I doubt there would be much benefit at that point and from some conversations I've had in Ohio I may be ok without aeration for a bit given the biomass I have at this point)

-Fall of 2022 or Spring of 2023 I'd like to introduce some predators to the mix depending on how everything is doing?
25 3-4" HSB
more FHM if needed for the HSB?


From there I'm not sure! I have SMB as a maybe because I know I'd like to but some GSH in the mix as well. Mainly for forage, but if they get too large I will pull them out and use as catfish bait. I've seen a few posts here about success with YP RES SMB or HSB so I'm hoping I can mimic that! The other large goal I have is to add hybrid or black crappie into the mix successfully. I don't need them in large numbers, but I would like to grow some larger ones! I know that can get tricky with overpopulation. But I plan on pulling out YP and Crappie when necessary for the frying pan.

Let me know what you all think! Please advise if my stocking numbers sound off or odd, I do struggle with that. The goal is to grow fat and healthy fish! I'll keep posting here and updating my results and hopefully will learn alot!

Photos below!










https://imgur.com/a/Ksm1QMd

I assume that you got the 5"-6" YP from Fender. Shelby did not sell any fish yesterday. If some of the YP appeared plump or sort of fat then those were the females. Normally male YP will be mature at 1 year whereas only a small percentage of the female YP will develop eggs at 1yr. So you could easily have a limited spawn in April. The earlier developing 1yr old females will tend to spawn a little later than older perch. If your new pond is muddy as in prior pictures during the spawn period eggs may not hatch well and plankton as fry food will be very reduced. YP fry need to eat well to survive. Minnow traps in Aug-Sep will collect 2"-3" YP to verify the success of a 2022 YP spawn.

5 lbs of FHM in a new 1/2 ac is more than enough to produce plenty of small FHM assuming the pond water begins to clear during the long spawn season of FHM. Normally you will begin to see FHM fry in early June. If you see lots tens of thousands of FHM in Sept I doubt you will need to add more FHM in fall 2022. Depending on the size of the spring 2023 numbers of FHM you might want to add 1-3 lbs of breeder FHM.

Yep! If you wanted to save some $$, get a soil test done specifically for turfgrass. That will tell you exactly what fertilizer and lime is needed so you don't over fertilize. A $10-$12 soil test is a lot cheaper than buying too much fertilizer.

I'd also get some jute erosion matting and lay that down over the newly seeded area. That will stop any future rains from washing topsoil away and will help keep the seed and fertilizer in place. Don't use the plastic erosion mats with straw in them, the straw will degrade and leave the plastic netting behind. That netting, if below full pool in the pond, can act as a gill net for smaller fish.

Just caught plumb 9.5" perch this evening. I love the growth rate! They were stocked @ mainly 4-5" in the spring.

Stocked 12 6-8” HSB this week. I noticed 2 died during the ride home so really only 10. They are already ferociously feeding on feed.

I have thousands of FHM swimming around so I think my forage base is OK for winter for now. Will supplement this spring with more FHM and GSH if I need to. I just figured GSH might be a wash if they hammer my YP eggs/fry.

The Hybrid BCP are seeing good growth rates. This one is 6” and they were stocked in May @ 2-4” It appears they are taking a liking to Optimal BG
https://ibb.co/KNsyf8Y

The YP growing great as well. I’ve caught them at 8”, and they were stocked in March @ 4-6”

Haven’t put my eyes on any of the RES yet unfortunately

Updates:

-The SFS are still reproducing as I'm finding eggs. As are the GSH.

-I had an explosion of FA and American Pondweed this year. Cons it looks bad, pros the fish are loving it. Hoping to get it under control with some physical removal and light dosage of chemical treatment.

-Did not see any RES on beds but it was very hard to tell because of all the FA on the banks. On the rare occurrence I catch a RES they are incredibly fat and around 9". They must not be missing any meals

-The hybrid Black Crappies are just not growing well, they are thin. There seem to be an abundance of shiners in the pond, but the crappies just aren't putting on mass like the rest of the fish. I'll likely chalk this up as a failed experiment, but that's okay. Interestingly enough many of them hit pellets at the surface, but they eat at such an incredibly slow pace.

-RBT stocked 15 in September and have 2 left to harvest. All were between 16-20" they did quite well, none of them died.

-YP are doing fantastic average size is 10" with larger ones 12-13"

-HSB are approximately 16" and fight like tanks, I hope to put a supplemental stocking of them in this fall.

Your structure area when you are done should look like a damn weed bed. Dense if you want it to function as year round habitat even during winter when natural weed beds die back. When you use tree branches as structure plan on them lasting only 3-4 years then the only things that are left are the 1 plus inch diameters that serve as fluffy very coarse cover not dense cover.

See those larger rocks as your rock structure?? If it was my pond I would have 1/3 to 1/2 the pond shoreline lined with this size and larger rocks.

PS --- expect during summer drought periods that the water level will drop and be at the bottom of the stone ledge. For your sake I hope not, but I find that 80% of the pond construction methods in Ohio leads to this. We will see just how good during drought years that your pond builder was.

anthropic - Actually this topic deserves its own thread. I think one could easily use a small FHM producer forage pond to grow out some HBCP to nice sizes either for restocking or table use harvesting. It would be a very good Pond Bosser fishery experiment. I think the pond would need to be drained and restocked every several years to eliminate any or all the F2 or F3 generation crappie and to see just how much hybrid crappie reproduction does occur. The details of this experiment would be very valuable and interesting information for the PB forum and for the story as publication in PBoss magazine. Before doing it I suggest that your talk to Bob Lusk because he might have suggestions to provide helpful hints for enhancing the project. IMO more documented, practical pond management science like this needs to be done by members of the forum. I hope you decide to "Get er Done"!

We had them last year. I had some that I kept all summer and was able to feed train about 60% of them. Nobody ordered them in the Fall so I stocked them into my pond. They grew from 2 1/2" in late May to 5"-6" by late October feeding them Optimal Starter #4 and then transitioning to a mix of Optimal Starter #4 and Optimal Bluegill Jr. I fed them once or twice a day when I remembered. You will need a good self-sustaining minnow population if you really want them to take off growth wise, or put them in a cage and feed train them, THEN release them into the pond.

I don't know how close you are to Anna, Ohio. Steve at Shelby Fish Farm packages small quantities of fish for people to pick up in plastic bags and cardboard boxes when the order isn't enough to deliver. With the price of diesel fuel and all the related price increases of everything else that is associated with it, we are going to have to rethink our minimum order size and/or what we have to charge for delivery. At 12 mpg, making a delivery 200 miles away is starting to cost some serious $$ when you have to figure in all the expenses related to hauling fish and than add labor on top if it. For a 400 mile round trip just the cost of the diesel fuel alone is $127.....

That spider army will eat every jig that tries to swim through it for the next 50 years.

Unless your pond is unique, the water level of your new pond will fluctuate 1ft-2ft during wet and dry years. IMO it will be hard to put something in 18" of water and not have it stick out of the water during a dry summer.

As goes the habitat, so goes what lives in it. The fishery will become a consequence of what I call "Happy Water" and the best habitat. Your mission is to create habitat for the different sizes of the different species of fish you plan to manage. If you know what each species of fish need at their different life stages, you can mimic as much as that as possible. That's what everyone's advice above is basically telling you.

Even better news about your pond? If you get a few years down the road and you don't like where it's going, you can make major changes to fix it in one day. That's one of my favorite things about small ponds.

When I had those Hybrid Crappie in a holding tank last year, about 75% converted over to feeding on Optimal Bluegill Jr when I'd feed about 20 min past sunset.

Lower reproduction rate, hybrid vigor in regards to growth.

I have a 6acre pond with at least an acre of flooded timber an brush. From what I can tell there have been one successful spawn since 2014 and you could catch them anywhere you fished. Now hardly any at all. Have had them taken off my line by large lmb more than once. There is many bg that surround BCP trying to spawn. The bg also have been doing it to LMB also. They are definitely not overbreeding here or in many ponds in my area

This is what one of our member moderators (Theo Gallus) says about SBS.
"If you are referring to Jonesfish, "Specklebelly" (SBS) is what I believe they are calling their BGxRES hybrid (based on their webpage and the conversation I had with the young man from Jones who treats one of my ponds).

I love my BGxRES (developed naturally from male BG and slutty RES females as opposed to purchased). They do indeed take very well to pelleted fish food. My current record is 13.25" long and a little over 2 1/2 pounds.

They have one negative that may be of importance to your pond - they will breed in higher numbers than RES (although not as high as straight BG). I suspect you will have insufficient predation to keep their numbers in check with just 12 HSB. I have breeding populations of YP and SMB in my 1/2 acre pond with RES and BGxRES, and remove 400-500 BGxRES annually to (try and) keep their numbers to what I consider optimum. (I feed fairly heavily, and about 1/3 of these are eating sized.)

As with all hybrids, subsequent generations are not a pure BGxRES, but random mixes of these two sets of genes. This has caused variation in appearances but no noticeable negatives or problems in my pond (my first BGxRES appeared in 2008, so I have had several generations of grandchildren and backcrosses with RES).

We do not swim in this pond, so I cannot comment on whether BGxRES will "nip" at swimmers as BG, but not RES, are sometimes complained about doing. FWIW my family has never had a problem with BG "nipping" at us while swimming in our other pond. (Perhaps we taste bad.)"

IMO I would wait until you have your other fishes established and doing well before adding SBS. If they have offspring that becomes mature the genetics could over several generations revert towards the more prolific specie which would be some sort of F generation of BG. If you decide to use Hybrid crappie HBCP, I would not stock SBS because both would be producing wide bodied offspring that could become too prolific that would require LMB as population control which may be okay for your goals. LMB would eventually eliminate or make the YP a very rare fish.

Although it’ll take some time, I’ll keep reporting back on these Hybrid Crappie and see the results. I think the challenge will be keeping them fed consistently unless they luckily convert to feed. At some point I’ll add some GSH to the mix and hopefully some different minnow breeds that sustain better like BNM.

Good questions. I don't have enough experience over time with them to answer those questions. I would cull small crappie no matter what the genetics though.

This is only the 5th year that we're stocking them, I will have to go back and talk to the customers that stocked them 4-5 years ago to see what they are seeing in their ponds. I know that if there is sufficient forage in the pond, they grow FAST. 4" fish can be 12" in a year. These have the black stripe on their nose, so you can tell which ones that they are. I'll ask to see if the offspring have the black stripe too.

The links now seem to work on my laptop.

Tyler, I'm glad to see that they are doing well. Fish near the bottom with a pink 1/32 oz jig head with a piece of night crawler on it for the RES.

Does anyone have a good method for relative weight or length standards for YP? I found this while doing some research. https://www.ncrac.org/files/biblio/YellowPerchPub.pdf

I added 5-6" YP in March of 2022, in November of 2022 I had some measuring 7-8" and a few outliers between 9-10". I feel like this is a pretty exceptional growth rate. I would think that the fish were at least 1 year old from the supplier when I got them, but not sure.

Well the HSB are feeding more aggressively now. I see some leaping out of the water which is great to watch. I’m working on adding more structure as advised in this thread to help sustain a shiner population. I put two under my dock and another in the corner of the pond near a cedar tree. I have enough of this recycled material to make another 10 or so and I plan on putting them in pretty thick!

Pics : https://imgur.com/a/DVz2bzl

New updates here: Stocked 15 RBT that were approximately 10" long in October. Been feeding on and off as the ice permits. Hoping to see a decent yield come late spring when I harvest. Seems like a fun addition so far.

Hoping to see a productive YP spawn. There is about 10' of bucket spiders and a cedar tree, as well as some spiral eel grass that could be effective. Still seeing shiners in the pond this winter so they seem to be sustaining. I'll likely add more if needed this spring.

Sorting RES from mutt sunfish at 2"-3" is very very risky for novice pond owners. My money bet is then on the side of getting the mutt sunfish. I even do not stock the 2"-3" size of RES if purity is important. . If you get the RES from Fender then IMO even the 4"-6" RES could contain mutt sunfish. They used to grow most of their own RES in wild ponds where hybrids are common. Sorting and 100% no mistakes is extremely difficult when seining and sorting thousands of fish. It is easy to drop a wiggling flopping fish into the wrong tank. Most fish farm help are not nearly as demanding as a very particular pond owner who wants all pure specie fish, mainly because the fish farm help do not need to deal the the consequences of mistakenly adding a wrong fish. Their thinking is "So what there are a couple mutt fish in the mix"..

If you get Fender's 4"-6" or larger RES in Apr or May you will get a good RES spawn this year. Fender does often have 5"-7" RES and even larger ones. An option would be instead of 50-100 2"-3" RES, spend the same $$ for several larger RES 5"-7" that will spawn for you this spring. With no predators lots of RES fry will survive. This will be a much safer chance of getting pure RES. Non-pure sunfish can really disrupt a small pond fishery long term in several ways. Once in and spawning you don't get them all out.

Background. Most all fish farms buy all their RES from out of state farms usually AR. So most all RES are sold shortly after arrival as 2"-3". Fender farms around 200+ac of water and is big enough to grow most of their own RES so - 1. Fender usually will have large sizes of RES some up to 8"-10". 2. These Fender RES are acclimated to OH climate and survive cold water winters well. So several breeder sized RES (5"-7") will result in the same or a better RES population for your new pond compared to 50-100 small 2"-3" risky sized RES..

I looked at Fenders prices. 50 2"-4"RES = $50. $60 will buy 30 4"-6" or 15 6"-8" RES. If it were my brand new pond I would buy the 15 6"-8". or a $60 mix of 4"-6" and 6"-8". If you want larger RES you should preorder them from Fender and they will call when they have them available.

Intermixed broken concrete from construction sites will work just as effectively as various sizes of natural rocks. Contact some local concrete contractors for sources of waste concrete materials. Some might deliver it for free rather than pay to dispose of it. Lengthy sections of concrete pieces lining shoreline provide excellent habitat for spawning and refuge areas of FHM.

Edited by Esshup:
If adding the broken concrete, try to get pieces without rebar or mesh in them, that metal sticking out of the concrete is a fish line catching monster, and if anyone were to fall on that it's much more dangerous than falling on plain broken concrete.

Be aware that in fertile nutrient rich ponds filamentous algae can at times swamp all types of underwater structure. The FA masses flourish and die back based on season, water temperatures, and nutrient fluctuations. FA in itself serves as structure / habitat and allows production of lots of natural tiny foods such as invertebrates utilized by small fish.