Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Just not working?

I have aerators installed, two diffusors going 24hrs a day for the last week. Built up slowly before that. The water clarity has improved and color is more aqua than brown that it was prior. However, the algae is getting worse if anything. See last week and today below. What next???? I can't get out often enough to rake it off, it’s so much work.

last week:


Today:

Note that with greater clarity, sunlight intensity that reaches the bottom increases. O2 bubbles form in the algae growing on the bottom and lifts it up to float which in turn exposes fresh high nutrient surface on which more algae can grow.

When my clarity gets high, I get the nasty floating green globs with a muck backing. That has happened since the pond was new and still very low nutrient. Pond dye may be of big help here if it continues to be a problem.

But for feeding quantity, my 12 bass and many other fish are growing exceptionally fast on 1 cup of quality food 1-2 times daily. From 3-4” in late May to near 10” and chunky. The problem I have is they are spoiled rotten on fish food and aren making much of a dent in the pumpkin seed population yet.

My plan is to wind down the feeding as the summer wanes so I don’t overdo the nutrient injection into my bathtub. I don’t have any flow through for much of the summer, so the nutrients don’t get rinsed out.

Your algae / bottom aeration situation is very good proof that bottom aeration does not hinder filamentous algae production. All the professional aeration companies ought to see this Forum post. Too bad it is not on YouTube.

I am more and more learning that ponds are NUTRIENT traps. Bathtubs with no drain. A Toilet with no flusher. Ponds first start out with nutrients that are leached from the dirt basin. Rain strips nitrogen from the air. Then Nature has all sorts of ways, maybe even daily, to put nutrients into that big bathtub. Tree leaves in the pond contain a lot of nutrients. Waterfowl manure has lots of nutrients. University research showed that 10 geese make the equivalent manure of ONE COW. In addition to what Nature puts in the pond, some people even fertilize the pond and feed the fish a pellet food that their manure adds nutrients. Nutrients then accumulate. Nutrients then grow plants as various types of plants or some greenery of some sort. Right now your nutrient laden pond is growing lots of filamentous algae,,,, we here call it FA.

The problem is - how do we get nutrients out of our big pond bathtub? One way if we have to harvest ANYTHING such as fish, and plants that grew in our pond bathtub. Harvest things growing in the pond that directly or indirectly used those nutrients. Plants are producers and animals are consumers. All things that grew in the pond from phytoplankton to turtles and fish used the nutrients. Harvest, Harvest Harvest. After years of nutrient accumulation the pond can grow so much plant stuff it is not practical to harvest all of it. A pond can be a big dilemma.

We can always keep killing the algae or plant growth with chemicals. We can slow the plant growth with pond dyes. Sometimes those algacide or herbicide chemicals accumulate in the pond. Where are they going to go once they kill the plants? What happend to the chemicals? . Accumulation of some algacide or herbicide chemicals for killing plants can become a problem when used long term. It depends. Then when the killed plants die they release everything that was in the plants - nutrients and any residual plant bound chemicals. Nature recycles nutrients that then grows more plants. Ponds are a big dilemma.

We can use fish such as Tilapia to eat a lot or all the algae. The fish do poop a nutrient rich manure while the fish grow from the plants/algae they ate. If we harvest the tilapia we remove some of the nutrients from the pond. Havesting any fish from the pond removes nutrients. Harvest is a good thing.

We can chemically bind a portion of the nutrients present at the time we added the chemical. There are various products used and sold to chemically bind nutrients as mostly the nutrient phosphorus - phosphorus binders. Alum as aluminum sulfate is one type. Aluminum is a heavy metal and does not decompose. They use this technology to bind nutrients in lakes to abate algae blooms. I am not sure how this frequent or repetitive binding of nutrients affects the overall pond system ecology for the long term of 10, 20, 30, 40 or more years.

There are varioius types of sediment removal systems to remove organic muck, slop and sediment from pond. The undigested organic materials in the pond contain a lot of nutrients.

Ponds can be a big dilemma.

Looking at the photo, I would venture to guess that the leaves going into the pond every Fall are the biggest culprit. Ditto everything that Bill said, but yoiu can also use PhosLoc to lock up P.

Ok, here is a video from my visit at the land today. Sorry its a bit long but I wanted to give different views etc. Let me know your thoughts. BG are still being caught in good size around 9" but for sure not as plump as they were in early May.

Test strips can't monitor the level of nutrients in the pond. They can't test a small enough amount. Leaves DO contribute, even though you don't think so. So does dust, pollen, basically ANYTHING that goes into the pond adds to the nutrient level.

Anyplace that sunlight can get to the bottom of the pond algae will grow. In a shallow pond, that is pretty much everywhere. Tilapia will help next year. Feed less, harvest more will help, planting underwater vascular plants will help too. Sourcing them is the issue.

I think we have a winner!!!! Got out to the property for first time in over week. The only change I made was greatly reducing feed times. Was at 35sec 5 times daily and went to 5 seconds twice a day for the last week. I did spray some before I left last week but that hasn't been helpful last few times so I'm attributing the success to lack of feeding nutrients. There's barely any algae present now! I upped feeding just a little to 10 seconds twice a day. Ill. Keep an eye on it but seems good finally!!

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If you had a hard rain, that will drive all the algae to the bottom of the pond too. Lets see in 2 weeks how well the pond is doing. Typically ponds that have an algae problem and are not using Tilapia to eat the algae are needing to be sprayed every 2 weeks.

esshup has good suggestions - heed them.

You say:

You are feeding high quality fish food and using a good autofeeder to distribute the pellets. A feed spreader time of 5-8 sec each day should distribute plenty of food for your size pond, type of fishery combination and your goals of big BG with some table use harvest while reducing the amount of green string algae (aka FA).

Since your pond is at a carrying capacity weight stimulated that was by IMO excessive pellet feeding,, and you have only harvested around 80 fish so far, then as suggested by esshop, each year going forward to start,,,,, FOCUS on harvesting mostly the female BG in spring early summer (Mar-July) and also remove Each Year at least 150-200 of the smaller BG sizes (3"-6") should allow you to maintain ample numbers of fast growing big BG for a once daily feeding of 5 sec. Catch, trap or seine to remove the small BG. Wth a small #8 or #10 hook and worm under a bobber, you should be able to catch at least 10-20 small BG each hour.
Is it a female or male bluegill. From our Common Pond Q&A Archives
https://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=422568&page=1

When LMB of 8”-10” appear shinny, harvest 10-15 of the medium size LMB per year. Keep good paper or digital annual records in a Pond Log of all sizes and numbers of fish harvested. Then the annual trends of fish sizes caught will allow you to see if the fish community of sizes and numbers is remaining somewhat stable. When the visual annual summaries of the fish caught and numbers harvested gets skewed toward average smaller sizes then you can make adjustments going forward as to what you are harvesting.

One idea to determine how much food is being distributed for each timed pellet feeding is when the feeder runs empty weigh the amount of food that you put into the feeder. Let’s use one 40 lb bag. Set the feeder to distribute for 5 seconds once a day. Then divide the number of feedings (days) it took to distribute the 40 lb of food pellets. Example - 1 quart of BG sized pellets weighs close to 14 oz. We start with 40 lbs of pellets. If it takes 30 days of one 5 second feeding per day to use the 40 lbs(640oz), then one 5 sec feeding delivers 21.3 oz of pellets. 21.3oz / 14oz/qt = 1.5 quart of pellets/day or 4.26 oz of pellets per second of feeder run time.
3-4 sec feeder setting should deliver close to 1 quart or pound of pellets.
In a fertile naturally productive 1 ac pond with alkalinity at or above 40 ppm, 1 quart of pellets per day for your specific fishery goal and pond should be very adequate to produce large bluegill for some annual harvest of panfish (females, immature BG, and a few two to five LMB per year that are larger than 14”). In my experience the more immature BG (2"-5") that you can harvest each year more than 200, this will skew higher the numbers of larger BG to be present for your 1 quart of pellets fed per day for this 1+ acre pond. Don't forget your pond with alkalinity above 40ppm will produce lots of natural foods even with some use of blue dye to adequately grow fish for your goals. Your dyed pond water in a white 5 gal bucket should be the color of clear sky blue. ALL this assumes you are doing proper thinning of the density of BG each year.

In the future be welcome to return with your pond adventure results so we can help with some management ideas to maintain a quality fishery or a better fishery and hopefully reduce the amount of floating string algae and need for algaecide. Pond dye should help reduce high amounts of string algae when the amount of pellets fed daily is reduced to around one 5 sec per day. Your pond gathers more algae feeding nutrients per day especially in summer. Nature says - Constant Accumulation of nutrients pushes the pond to grow more plant materials.

From the video what size is the pond? The hardwater / alkalinity pond should produce enough natural food to feed a lot of fish; at least 300 lbs per ac. If it were my pond I would feed them just once a day with a maximum of 2/3 to 1 quart of pellets each day. Run feeder to deliver 1/2 to max 1 quart per day. Feeding too many fish results in too much manure to grow too much greenery. Did you tell us what brand of fish food you are using???
I think a good guideline for amount of fish to harvest each year is 60-70% of the total poundage of pellets that were fed each year.

IMO there needs to be a guide somewhere on the Forum to suggest how many pounds of fish should be harvested based on how many pounds of fish food that is fed to the fish. Maybe I can encourage editor Lusk to chime in here or better yet write an article about this topic for the Pond Boss Magazine.


Other fish pros are welcome to provide opinions on this fish harvest rate compared to the amount of fish food added to the pond. Comments???

Toby - I keep forgetting that you have constant overflow from some spring fed water. Pond dye is not an option.
Your fish in a healthy plump range in reality has a lot to do with how crowded those fish are as density in the pond and how much food each one gets to eat on a daily basis. Thin bodied fsh usually means they are too crowded. Then reduce their density so each one gets more to eat. Adding more forage to an unbalnced fisheyr is IMO not a really good idea because feeding more food to over crowded fish often improves the spawning and recruitment of more new fish to an already overcrowded ecosystem. Fish harvest from a pond that is continually naturally becoming more productive with more fish is the wisest management for producing a high quality fishery for the long term.