Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Yellow perch pond

we are going to make a small 1/4 acre pond next spring. Was thinking about a nice fish for fishing and tablefare, the yellow perch. Do these need a mass producing forage fish like sunfish/blue gill or can they do well on just FHM? My plan was to put 1000 FHM in, then the YP. maybe every spring or fall put another 1000 FHM in. Will this work?

It can work, but it will work a lot better if you stock pellet trained YP. Pellet trained will do several things for you: 1. YP will grow faster and bigger, 2. you will grow more lbs of YP per acre, 3. FHM will last longer between restockings due to lot of YP eating pellets instead of FHM. YP by themselves that are not pellet trained and without another predator, can easily wipe out a dense starting FHM population. This happens a couple years after the YP start recruiting. Adult YP can be aggressive predators of FHM. FHM are darn easy to catch and must be 'dumb' if YP can wipe them out. I've seen YP come right up the the shore line and attack stocked FHM to the point of chasing and rooting FHM out of the sediment. Without pelleting feeding YP it will be hard to keep FHM in the pond even if you stock 1000 in spring and fall. IMO you need some other forage fish such as bluntnose minnows, shiners and or with crayfish esp if you dont pellet feed. Adult YP easily eat 2" crayfish. Learn bluntnose minnows and catch stock from the wild. You are not much of a pond manager if you can't do this fairly simple task.

It is very hard to pellet train wild YP, and its much harder than pellet training BG. It is best to stock a domestic strain of YP that have been domesticated for several years. And it is best to initially stock some 4"-6" and a few 6"-8" stockers that are heavily habituated to pellets. Fingerling YP can easily go off feed.
YP without 'good' thinning can easily become overabundant to the point of stunted or slow growing if food is not always abundant. Lots of the right kinds of food are key to growing good fish - all species. Thinning can be manual (traps, angling, seining, egg removal) or a few non-reproducing predators such as WE, HSB or some SMB. Reproducing predators usually end eating too many of the YP and then harvest of YP becomes limited due to too few adult YP.

YP won't work with BG as forage. And I doubt they will work with RES as forage although someone should try that.

ok thanks. My local hatchery sells pellet trained YP so that shouldnt be a problem. I also have a stream on the property and we catch a ton of crayfish.

That is a good start. Start by allowing minnows to spawn from spring to fall then add the YP in fall or start by adding lots of minnows in spring with mostly smaller 2"-4" YP (70%-80%) and a few (20-30%) 4"-6" YP.

good plan, thank you very much.

Try collecting minnows in the stream. Take photos of them and post them. We can tell you if they are a worthy forage species for a pond...

CJBS2003 -I did that a yr ago and posted it on here with three pics of the minnows from the creek. Most members replied that they looked like creek chub and warned against putting them in the pond.

Keep at it Savannah, try different locations of the streams. I can tell you first hand that these two know what they are talking about and will let you know when you have found the "right stuff" for your pond. Once you find where the right minnows live then it will be easy to locate other areas just like those and trap away. Its a great learning experience.

See this link for some info about potential forage species: Focus on bluntnose minnow, spotfin shiner steelcolor shiner - all pond spawners. Worst case use golden shiners.
http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfruf/bio4950/fish_id3.htm

Mom & Pop Bait dealers that sell native species collected from streams can be a good source for a few breeders when starting a new pond before you add the predators.

Bill, that forage link you provided is a nice overview. A good primer for us beginners. However I noticed that the Spotfin Shiner and the Spotail Shiner photo ID are actually the same photo ( the name on the photo even says Spottail on both photos). So probably the spotfin photo is wrong. Perhaps it don't matter because they look so much the same?

You are correct, it's the wrong photo for the spotfin shiner. The spotfins will never have a dark spot back by the tail. The spotfins look very similar to the steelcolor shiner. The steelcolor in the picture is an older adult and young spotfins (1"-2.5") do not have as pronounced body markings as the steel color in the picture. Steel color and spotfins will get close to 5" long and make a very good reproducing forage species in a YP pond.

See the picture of the main photo and juvenile yearling of spotfin in this link:
http://www.wiscfish.org/fishid/wFrmFishD...dae)&GID=69

[quote=YP won't work with BG as forage. And I doubt they will work with RES as forage although someone should try that. [/quote]

I read this in a post of Bill Cody's so I suspect it is right but I was wondering why? I am seriously thinking of adding YP to my pond as a predator. I now have an abundance of FHM, GSH, BG minnows and BF in a very vegetated pond. The BG worry me long term and I don't want to add LMB.

I messed up the quote system somehow.

YP are not an aggressive enough of a predator to control the prolific reproduction of BG. BG can IMO 'out spawn' YP. The other reasons are: 1. YP do not get large enough to eat a very big BG. 2. YP have a relatively small mouth gape and with their small adult size (8"-14") they are very size limited as to what size of food item that they can swallow. 3. With BG being a spiney rayed fish this makes them less desirable by smaller predators such as YP who prefer and thrive on soft rayed forage fish not spiney rayed deeper bodied forage fishes. Essentially the two species are not well matched naturally nor functionaly as predator and forage fish.

YP might, and this is a BIG might, be able to control HBG or RES reproduction especially if the pond owner is willing to manually remove annually lots of HBG fingerlings at the 2"-4" range that in their second year of life become too large for YP to eat. But, if I was doing it, I would add SMB and or some HSB to assist the YP in consuming young of HBG.

A True Story: There is a small 1/3 ac pond with some submerged weeds near me where the owner did not want bass of any kind. He decided to stock, against my suggestion, just YP and RES. After about 16 yrs, IMO both species are too abundant and slow growing and numerous ones of both species are likely stunted, slow growing or at least quite thing bodied. YP are up to thin bodied 10" long and RES to 6.5". The owner finally in 2010 allowed me to put in 6 WE to help control both species. The pond could also probably use some HSB.

Very interesting observation on that 1/3 acre pond, Bill. Could you get a feel for RES abundance? Were RES overly abundant on their own (intraspecific competition) or could perhaps the YEP have been so abundant that they were competing for food with the RES in that small pond (interspecific competition)? Tough question, I know! However, any thoughts might be really interesting.

Dr Dave - Here are some angling catch records using my simple sampling technique for the YP-RES for the above pond.
1998 in about 2 hrs caught 3 RES 5"-6.5" and 18 YP 5"-9.5" long. CPUE 10.5.
2003 in about 2.5 hrs caught 20 RES 3.2"-6.5" and 27 YP 3.5"-10.5". CPUE 18.8.
In 2003 the 20 RES were 16@ 3.2"-4.0", 2@ 4.1-5", and 2@ 5.1-6.5".
In 2003 the 27 YP were 11@ 3"-5", 6@ 5.1"-7", 10 @ 7.1-10.5".
IMO there were too many fish in this 1/3 acre pond and I doubt that there were enough snails to feed all the RES that were present. I have observed 'pond' snails in YP stomachs, but never checked somach contents of fish from this pond. As usual too many individuals start over eating the food source thus the need for predators of some sort. In this case and IMO significantly fewer fish of both species would improve growth rates and size structure.

I plan to go back and resample this pond to see if the 6 WE were enough to affect the RES-YP size structure in this pond. I may not get sampling done this year and might find time to do it in the fall of 2013 which will be the third full summer after WE stocking. Stocked WE were 8"-10" long. I would "love" to catch one of those WE using my simple sampling technique that I presented at the 1st Pond Boss conference. If the above pond does not have improved size structure of YP and or RES after I sample it, I may add some HSB to explore the the combined influence of the two types of predators.

Thanks!! Good stuff!

Thanks for your detailed answer Bill. The YP along with the SMB will give me something to think about.

Now this is strange, in my 12 year experience with my one acre pond until a winter fish kill. I stocked LMB, BG, FHM, CC, 20 KOI, 18 GC, 6 Israeli carp. At the end of the 12 years I had no LMB of any size and I had very few minnows and not a lot of BG. Most of the dead fish floated to the shore after the ice thawed and I didn't see any LMB. I just didn't have any except a few LMB minnows, and I never had any BG, just a few when I was feeding and observing what fish I had. So what was taking out nearly all of the minnows including the BG? Besides the Channel Catfish I suspect the Grass Carp. The reason I say this is that old time natural ponder Andrew Zetts was using GC in his ponds until he said he spotted the GC scooping up LMB fry. If this is so could that be the reason I had no minnows to speak or even practically with no LMB. You would think the BG would have been taking the pond over without the LMB.

Zetts tells some interesting stories in his catalogue. Some of which seem awful far fetched... I'm not sure you saw all th dead fish you had after the kill. Some may have never floated to the surface.

Yes, not all the fish did float to the surface. I saw the bones of one large one from my boat that I was going to check out when the water was warmer and I could get into the water, but later I couldn't find it because of silt or weeds.

I give my Zetts catalog to a fellow ponder a few years ago and now I wish I had it back since there will never be any more. I do have his Aquatic Farming book but the catalog was a treasure in itself.

I bought turtles, plants and the Israeli carp from him. The only other place I found Israeli carp was in California and now there are none that I can find.