Knobber-

You don't know what is in your pond unless you sample it. Of course that might be hard through the ice!! next spring you can put out traps, or ag lime is pretty cheap and if you get the ph high enough nothing will survive. If your pond is truly 'empty' now and just mud then a good hard freeze over mud will go a long way this winter to making you feel comfortable about your blank slate come spring.

So is the grade around your pond likely to send much watershed runoff water to the pond or are you dependent on rain? If you only had option of rain and the ground water table is low already, you may try to think about whether you culd build a little swail or berm in the 'uphill' direction on 2 sides to better encourage runoff to go in your pond?

I agree that it is unlikely RES will survive if you are in the middle of the mitten (lower peninsula of MI) I'm pretty sheltered with trees and with lake effect warm winds and my RES didn't make it. PS are better. I know of no one who stocks them or trucks them to you so you would have to find those on your own as well.

There is more to the story about HSB and MI pond regulations. They aren't allowed and they aren't forbidden either. A somewhat gray area although if you have a hole in the middle of the woods with no inflow or outflow then the rules don't apply but that doesn't mean there can't be some sort of 'punishment' later if the wrong person wanted to make your life difficult. I can share more about my experience if you care to chat about it sometime.

SMB do not have the ability to control northern bluegill/standard bluegill populations. Some try to control the overpopulated BG problem by using hybrid BG. That definitely slows reproduction since most HBG are male. But then when some of the hybrids revert back to one of the parent strains now you have some BG and some Green Sunfish GSF. The Greenies bring in a new dimension of management conditions to wrestle with and deal with. You then are stuck adding a predator with a bigger appetite like CC or LMB and then the balance gets harder. Some have tried to use Northern Pike or even some Muskie to be that top predator but no one really has found the formula for a SMB and bluegill pond where a few bonus NP or a few tiger muskie brought it back in to balance without using LMB.

So most of us are cautious about keeping GSF, HBG and standard bluegill out of the pond if we are going to use SMB as our main top line predator. WE then try to get tons of food for the SMB, and then use a panfish that isn't going to have multiple spawns per summer.

Another very good forage option would be Tilapia. However unless you set up a large indoor tank to keep your own brood stock or know someone who has a aquaponics outfit near you, it may be too expensive to source and haul in the 40-50 pounds of Tilapia you would want to stock in your pond.