Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Maximum Carrying Capacity

Can somebody help define this and tell me how I would know if I've exceeded what my pond can carry? Below is my stocking history. I probably lost some of the tilapia this past winter although I never saw any floating. In addition to what is below, I put in another 500 3" - 5" CNBG this spring. Somebody in a previous thread I started questioned wheter my pond could handle this much fish. I don't know if it can or can't. What I do know is that I have never seen a fish kill and when my fish feeders go off I have fish feeding including some of the LMB.

There's a thread in the archives on carrying capacity by Bruce Condello.
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92440#Post92440

It was a little deep for me, but I did understand what he was getting at.

So, I had to ask for clarification.

This is the last linked thread in that discussion:

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=201295

Does that help?

In short, it doesn't matter the number of fish, it's the pounds of fish that matter. I wouldn't count the FHM, they most likely are all eaten a month after stocking.

You haven't exceeded the carrying capacity of your pond. If you have, the fish would start dying. You might be close, but not over the edge. The only way to tell is to try and figure out how many pounds of fish you have in your pond. (and that's VERY hard to do without a lot of guesswork, fish sampling and weighing of each fish).

RC51 made a comment about tagging fish and removing all non-tagged fish. I'm doing just that with the LMB in my pond. I'm putting in feed trained LMB, and tagging each one with a numbered floy tag. I can track their length/weight that way, and know what fish to remove (slow growers and non-tagged LMB).

It is absolutely essential that you anticipate what the fish will become (weigh) when they get bigger. Its not how much they weigh when you put in small fish but rather what will the result be in 12 to 18 mths. That is where standard stocking plans came from.