Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Just a few off base questions.

I know the members here are probably all in many varied lines of work. I my self am an exaircraft assembler. Has anybody wondered wether a program could be created "sim pondboss"?
My secound questions a bit more fish related I don't have a home/or land yet. But when I was young I often fished a pond that was loaded with stunted sunfish and bullheads. What is the best predator for controlling bullheads. After all bullheads are good eating.

"Sim Pondboss" would remind me too much of work. I come here to escape into a kinder world.

I believe stripped base or largemouth will do a good job at eating the YOY/small ones, keeping them from proliferating. You'll have to fish out the larger ones.

There are some ecosystem simulation software programs that are available and a few are specifically aimed at aquatic environments. The programs that I am aware of are geared more toward a teaching tool rather than a game type of software. It is, IMHO, a very interesting concept. One such software, "Lagoon" simulates a marine environment. It allows the user to control many paramenters including the types of organisms from bacteria to sharks, concentrations, death rates, feeding rates, etc. Other parameters are also built into the system and can be controlled such as wind speed - which in the simulation affects disolved oxygen. And allows control over nitrate introduction. Based upon a users input you then run a simulation and it "calculates" what the result of your simulation is. Interesting stuff. But as I said it isn't a graphic friendly game style software like "Sims." There are other types of ecosystem simulation programs used in biology classes that are mostly an Excel spreadsheet model in which you enter in predator and prey parameters and it calculates the results.

Based upon actual experience if I ran the Lagoon software, I would end up with a Lagoon that had very few fish and one fat shark.




That's a loaded question. Best predator? I would say it depends on where you are located. I saw a special on TV the other night about "Monster" fresh water predator fish. Based upon that I would say the BEST predator would be Pike, Muskie, or Alligator Gar. Course if you put any one of those fish in a pond I doubt you'd have much else in your pond.

There, two off base answers (that's kind of a speciality of mine).

At the St. Louis Zoo they have an exhibit building called the Living World that contains only a few live animals but is more of a ecology teaching exhibit. Inside they have a large long fish tank that represents a small river ecosystem. Next to it is a computer touch screen with a simulation of a pond environment with several species. Each species is represented by a population bar at the side of the screen. If I remember right the species were bluegill, bass, turtles, crayfish, and algae. The sim started with all the populations at a 50% level on the bar which represented a perfect balance in the pond. By touching the bar graph for any species you could increase or decrease the population of that species and put the pond out of balance. It then would show how the other species populations would rise and fall in response over time. You could also eliminate one (ex. bass) and watch the other populations explode then crash until the only thing remaining was algae. I don't know how accurate it was but it was fun to play with.

Wow, that sounds cool DJT.