Do you happen to have a name of the place that sells spotfin or bluntnose? Or do I need to go catch them?
. If you are in Ohio BNM and spotfin are very common fish in streams where good numbers as broodstock can be easily collected by seining and / or trapping. PM me for options. These species are not raised by fish farms. There is one public place that sells these for aquarium use/trade; although they are expensive as in $4-$5 each. Higher quanities and if picked up on site are a little cheaper. I think his prices maybe include shipping???? Contact them for prices and availability. Those high prices give one an indication of their availability and rarity.
http://jonahsaquarium.com/jonahsite/fishlist.htmThere is a small farm in NW Ohio that sells spotfins although the SFS pond is in transition due to a GSF invasion and no SFS will probably be sold until fall 2022. This farm does not ship fish due to fish virus restrictions and testing requirement of the Great Lakes region.
IMO my experience so far, if the pond has predators other than YP, I think BNM and SFS are not a good long term forage fish unless the pond has lots of submerged and marginal weed habitat. In a pond this usually amounts to 25-35% or more of the pond bottom or shoreline having dense habitat. Few pond owners will tolerate this much good weed habitat. Think about the amount of weed growth the surrounds high quality fisheries in natural lakes. BNM and SFS need lots and lots of underwater weed type habitat to survive any amount of normal bass, HSB and WE predation. I discovered WE choose mostly the large breeder SFS.
All the minnow types of FHM, BNM, and SFS have relatively small maximum sized adults that significantly struggle to survive a common presence of predators larger than 12-14". When you loose the large breeders the population is soon to be eliminated as evidenced by FHM in ponds. Golden shiners serve as better long term soft rayed forage than these smaller minnows when common bass predation is present. More study needs to be done in private ponds with uncommon forage such as lake chubsucker, mudminnows, steelcolor shiner, alewife(landlocked 3"-6"), and even the exotic invasive round goby (4"-8"). I know of a YP-WE pond that now has the round goby invader. Time will tell the rest of this story.
If the pond is mainly for growing bass or CC then the various sunfishes and YP are very good forage fishes that also serve well as guests to dinner.
