Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Golden Shiners Pros/Cons

I've read a lot of articles and watched some videos with great discussion about golden shiners.

The RW of our bass is hitting around 90% which has forced me to cull some fish, but I want to take it a step further and boost my food chain. Here's what I gather:

Pros:
1.) diversify food chain
2.) slender profile easy to consume

Cons:
1.) nest raiders of bluegill
2.) parasite could inhibit spawning ability

For those with experience, what do you say?

You want to grow big bass? GS would likely be a plus.

You want to grow big BG? Don't stock GS.

I think the higher the diversity of forage foods in a water body the better the quality of the fishery will become. Two good things that improves the survival of GSH broodstock are more types of refugia habitat for the adults and ample spawning habit. Refuge: haven, sanctuary, protection, food availability and shelter

TFS populations work best as forage for LMB between 1 and 3 lbs. They establish best in waters that stay above 45 F+-. There are excellent threads on the forum about using and maintaining TFS as a forage source. If you are in central or south MS they are an option provided your pond keeps a bloom most of the year (see Bill's comments on pond productivity above). You can use both TFS and GSH in combination. Under normal circumstances (no overabundance of egg eater populations) I don't worry about the egg eating tendency of the fish present.

FYI
In Role of Male Parental Care in Survival of Larval Bluegills by Mark B. Bain and Louis A. Helfrich in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 112: 47-52, 1983 were their findings about predation. Predation on larval bluegills was inhibited by nest-guarding male bluegills. The data implicated juvenile bluegills as the major predators on bluegill larvae, followed in importance by pumpkinseed. Bluegill (3-12 cm total length) were the most abundant nest predators. Pumpkinseed (7 -11 cm), largemouth bass (4- 5 cm), and whitefin shiners (5-6 cm) also were nest predators.

Without proper spawning habitat and refuge habitat, they will need to be stocked annually. They don't have a rolling spawn like BG, so if the correct habitat isn't there for them, they won't pull off a successful spawn. In a 1 acre pond, without correct habitat for them, I have stocked 200 adult GSH and they did not establish in the pond, There were none observed a year later. These were fish that were between 9" and 11" in length.

In a customers pond that has the proper habitat for them to reproduce (but no LMB, only HSB, SMB BG and YP as predators for the first 4-5 years, now there are HBC in there that are doing exceptionally well) they are doing VERY well. So well that he catches and removes a few hundred adults in the winter when ice fishing. The HSB and Hybrid Crappie are doing exceptionally well in his pond due to having forage fish in the area of the pond that they occupy. The SMB, after the introduction of Northern SMB vs the Neosho SMB that were in there, are doing very good too.

We stocked the same amount of FHM and GHS initially. . There is habitat for both to reproduce. After year 3, there were no more FHM to be found.