A quick question for all of you. I am stocking a new northern pond, and am considering putting in Pumpkinseeds as one of the species. I am wondering if any of you know if they bite swimmers? Good swimming for kids is the primary goal of the pond, so I am going to avoid Bluegills for example, as I know they can nip at people. Anyone have experience with Pumpkinseeds?

You may be mixing up Green Sunfish with Bluegills. GSF are the offenders in this case, not BG or PS.

Some get nipped by BG, some (me & mine included) don't.

BG used to bite my son while he was swimming, but it never deterred him from swimming, even when they drew blood. I teased him that he needed to wear a bikini top... He also swam down water snakes to try and catch them.

Straight BG is what tear us up in our pond, not to the point of drawing blood or actually even hurting but just pester the heck out of us, I have never seen pumpkin seed or any idea in how they behave tho.

BG are terrible biters here in my area and many have problems with them taking over ponds and getting stunted. RedEar are supposed to keep to themselves better, especially with good predators stocked in pond.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. BG feel too risky to us, so we are going to leave those out. What do people feel are the risk of Pumpkinseeds? I am wondering if we leave them out to err on the safe side, but at the same time they do seem like they could be good forage fish so I'm not sure.

Since you are too far North to have RES, I would consider adding Pumpkinseeds to the pond. I've never been bothered by either BG or PS. Both PS and RES eat snails which is part of the life cycle of swimmers itch, yellow and white grub.

Ok thank you esshup, that's a good point about snails. We will try them out and hope the predator fish can also help encourage them to stay away from swimmers.

Ted is it easier to source pumpkinseed in Canada? Very hard to source them even in northern states where many lakes have them here in the USA

Good question. I have only found one place that has them, but that one place seems to also be the only place that has pretty much anything other than trout. We will see what they actually have available come next spring.