Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking New Pond Help

I just acquired a track of land in Iowa from my Grandparents, their are two newly built ponds on them neither have more than a foot of water in them.

One is 9 acres and the other is 2 1/4 acre.

Im planning on making the 2 1/4 acre lake Channel Catfish and Redear Sunfish stocking also some amount of baitfish for start-up food and let them establish a population and then add the Redear Sunfish and Channel Catfish. The reason i dont want bass in this lake is because i dont want the Channel Catfish population to be threatened beacuse i read bass eat many channel catfish eggs. I also read that redear sunfish dont often overpopulate and stunt. Im pretty sure these two fish are a good combination in a lake. Am i right in my assumption or should i putt in more predators?

Im planning on making the 9 acre lake a mix of a few redear sunfish, bluegill, and green sunfish (mostly just bluegill) with bass, bullheads, and crappie. Do you think all of these could be put in the pond or should i not put the crappie in?

Ive never stocked fish so please help me out witht the numbers or fish and size. Also anything else you think i should know before i stock. Please tell me if you think my ideas need alot of help.


Thank You,

Golden Shiner

Golden Shiner, are you saying that both ponds only have one foot of water depth?

yes, they havent filled up yet.

G'Day, G'Shiner, and welcome to the forum.

I would like to talk about your ponds one at a time. First, the 2.25 acre.

As you indicate, CC will ssawn in ponds given the presence of suitably sized cavities. These can be natural (holes in bank, hollow logs/stumps) or artificial (tiles, buckets). What CC usually fail to do after spawning is to have any significant number of fry survive very long, given the presence of other types of fish in the pond. LMB certainly would be quite adept at eating smaller CC; but sunfish such as RES also would be likely to catch and eat CC fry and small fingerlings, which are reportedly very slow. So the presence of sufficient numbers of small, hungry RES might be just as effective a barrier to successful CC recruitment as LMB would.

OTOH are the RES. They are certainly much less prolific and hence less prone to overpopulating than BG are. I would still worry about them eventually producing enough numbers to possibly become stunted if the only predators keepng them in check were CC (especially smaller CC, which are much less predacious). The proposed CC/RES only combo is not a commonly seen one, and I am afraid the best I can personally do for this combo is state that there might be problems with either species overpopulating. Or it could work.

IF you are willing to forego the possibility of CC recruitment entirely (something many or most of us are happy to do, given the highly available nature of low priced CC fingerlings in assorted sizes for restocking), the addition of another predator species should completely eliminate the possiblity of the RES ever overpopulating as well. LMB would certainly accomplish this, but you may want to consider a predator species with limited or no reproductive potential so as to avoid having to control predator overpopulation. I suggest you consider such fish as HSB, SMB, and perhaps Walleye to see how well one of them might fit into your fishing and management goals.

Now, the 9 acre pond. What your goals for this water? Most of us consider GSF, Bullheads, and Crappies to all be problematic species. If you have your heart set on any of them, you are likely to have to use other species as the means to controlling them. This might likely mean keeping a large, stunted LMB population as the backbone of holding down Crappie, GSF, and BH numbers so they do not overpopulate.

Handling any one of these species is likely to be enough of a challenge for you (indeed, for any pond owner), so I urge you to think about if you really want them in the big pond. It is definitely possible to manage GSF, it is probably possible to manage Crappie (although there is no generally accepted successful method known, there are a fair number of people looking for good way(s) to do it), and I can't recall anyone who has wanted to manage for BH.

One more thing. With all the species you are considering, you should make heavy use of the search function to locate threads on each of them, and then read them to see what has been experienced by others wrt managing GSF, CC, BH, etc. Look up at the top right of the screen, under the "Post A Reply" label. See the "search" option? Click on it, enter a species name in "Search Words", set the Search Forum to "Questions and Observations", "Stocking a New Pond", and "Managing an Existing Pond" (one at a time, of course; these three categories are most likely to lead to the info you want IIRC), and press the "Search" button at the bottom of the screen. You will get links to a number of threads on the species you have selected, some of which will provide some very useful info for you to consider.

Good luck, good reading, and we'll be expecting to hear back from you with more questions (the more we learn here, the more we ask).

The LMB and crappie will keep the GSF and BH in check. The real problem will be keeping the LMB and crappie in check.

I think in the 2.25 acre pond that harvesting just the right amount of redear and channel catfish will substitute for predators.

I have about a 1/3 acre pond that my catfish spawn every year and let me tell you, they have lots of babies. I only feed enough that the most aggressive ones grow pretty good and as soon as they reach eating size I try to catch them. It is hard to catch that many. Everything I catch goes to the table or another pond. I even seine a few times a year and catch around 30.
I still have a lot of stunted catfish!
I put in a few redear two years ago and I am waiting to see if they have much effect. My water isn't real clear anymore. Clear water would probably help the babies to get eaten but the more catfish you have the dirtier the water...
I personally wouldn't encourage them to spawn without good predators unless I could take out their spawning holes at will.
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Theo,

That was a heck of a nice post. Thoughtful, informative, funny...

Have you ever thought of becoming a moderator?

If I hadn't already given you five stars a long time ago, I'd do it again. You certainly deserve it.