Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking need help/ideas

hi all,i need help with my 200acre pond,,,,its 70% common carp:(
i cant afford to kill off everything in the pond with chemicals so thats not an option. i have been catching and killing as many carp as possible. i was wondering if i had got thousands of blue gill (or some other fish) that they might out-compete the carp and drive their numbers down? for the last few years the bass and sunfish fishing has been horrible:( is there anything i can do to combat these friggin carp???? please help:)

Lets see, a 200 acre POND!!!???? That's a heck of a lake in my book!

Other than dropping the water level and hitting it with Rotenone, I don't have any good suggestions on eliminating the carp. You could try bowfishing, but that'll only reduce them, not eliminate them.

I'm sure the experts will chime in in a bit. My question to them is:

What would stocking 400 or more muskies do?

how clear is the water in your lake? My brother goes Bowfishing in our nearby lake and kills around 40 or 50 carp a night. He's got a 19 foot long by 9 foot wide custom built boat that has 18 500 watt halogen lights shining down into the water. He usally fills up a 55 gal drum most of the nights that he goes. might be worth a try if your water is very clear.

200 acre pond... WOW! I am sure some musky would do some hurtin! I'd gladly do all the bowfishing you need done and invite all my friends. I love carp fishing too... 70% carp is a mess though. What a shame... What is the rest of the fish population like?

Tell us more about the pond/lake.

the water is very clear. the coves have thick hydrilla and lilly pads. the main lake is a baron waste land ,due to the carp. not much cover in main body. ide say there is about 20 lm bass,,,1000 sunfish,,,500 mixed catfish and a dozen crappie left in the pond:(

aside from the 10000000000000000000000000 carp that is lol

Time to have some carp fishing tournaments! That could help a little in thinning your adult sized carp.

If you believe you only have about 20 LMB in the lake, you need to add more top line predators right away! I bet you have more than that though. In that size of a lake, if you only had 20 bass, I highly doubt you would have ever seen one. Carp young of year are excellent forage for predator fish. You should be able to grow out some monster predator fish, though recruitment for your predator fish will be quite low until they start reducing that carp population considerably. Carp really make spawns difficult for other fish.

The way I see it, you could add a massive amount of predators which should help thin your carp to a level that has little negative impact on the lake. Then, your NEW challenge will be trying to establish a strong forage bass, because you'll end up transitioning to a predator heavy lake... which will then need fixing.

i like your ideas weisguy!,,,i have been trying to recruit some big LMB. what do you guys think of using green sunfish/prech and pike to eat the carp???? p.s. i can get a ton of green sunfish and a few large LMB from a friends pond.

Depending on your budget, a large gill net would be the easiest way to remove large numbers of carp efficiently. Also, large fyke nets can have similar results. Large BOW like this require management methods beyond what a normal pond owner can usually afford...

can you please describe the 2 nets,and their use to me?

Gill nets are usually set perpendicular to shore. When fish swim along, they can swim into the net, their heads go through, but their body doesn't. They then try to back out and the net gets caught in their gills plates, and the fish are then caught...
Simple diagram and description

Where to buy one

Fyke nets are also set perpendicular to shore. Here, fish come to a blocking net, the fish cannot swim through it so they follow it, usually away from shore. There a funnel type netting system is. The fish follow into the funnel and then get trapped.

Diagram of different styles of fyke nets and a place to buy them.

thanks, do you use one? can i buy the $69 one? or do i need to spend $300

You will never be able to reduce the carp population by netting by yourself. You would work yourself to death, kind of like harvesting a 200 acre corn field by hand by yourself.

Stocking enough Muskies to make a difference would cost you a fortune (400 Tiger Muskies @ $15 each = alot of money) Then following up with 200 every 2-3 years to keep em going and always having smaller muskies to eat the smaller yoy carp.

Transporting bass and other fish from local ponds wont get you any results or fix the problem either. If budget is a concern, use what you have to make the most of the situation. maybe pick one spot that you enjoy to fish from and set up one fish feeder and feed some fish food everyday. You will congregate some gamefish in that area as well as tons of carp too, but they will be easy pickins when congregated to that spot. Sit out with a can of corn and catch trophy carp all day long and you will have more fun than you could ever dream possible. You could create a world class carp fishing zone!!! Then you could stock a couple hundred hybrid bluegill at that feeder if you want to raise some meat fish as well. They will outcompete the carp for the food!

Probably a $1000 investment in feeder and food and fish and you will not be fixing your lake, but adapting to your lake and will catch alot of fish and will wear out a few fishing poles!

Spent many of nights with gill nets in college trying to catch striped bass. Along with the striped bass we caught lots of other species with carp being one of them. There are many different sizes on mesh size, etc. on gill nets to limit the amount of by-catch and to target specific sizes of fish, you can even suspend them in the water column to increase catch rates, etc.. So if you go with the gill net method, you will catch some carp but remeber you will also catch many other fish that you do not want to. Also, if you do not check the nets every couple of hours you will have a lot of fish die since they will not be able to swim. Like Nate said, it is very labor intensive and you would never get rid of them with just gill nets.

Two fronts have to be addressed:

1) Trying to stop recruitment of new carp.

2) Getting rid of adult carp.

For item one, it seems like we have mild agreement that some kinds of predator fish are needed.

For item two, it seems like netting, trapping, fishing, and bow hunting are the options.

What is the water source for the pond? I'm asking because I wonder if you can easily draw down the lake. Then you might have less area to work with. I wouldn't want to draw down the lake if there was a chance it would not fill back up easily (ie/ no rain).

I would think fishing torny.A bunch of fishermen,the more the better,can do a kot of damage to a fish population pretty fast if they keep EVERY carp they catch.Run an ad if nessassary and get a crowd.Offer prizes.

I agree with what Nate has said above. It's going to be extremely difficult to control that amount of carp, but I do believe it's quite possible as long as you have a long term outlook. Unless you are prepared to spend a LOT of money, the key will be bringing the predator:prey balance back to a sane level.... over many years.

If your are SURE you have an extremely small predator population, I would be more inclined to add massive amounts of small LMB. They are pretty cheap, and they'll target carp YOY. My guess is you'd be looking at adding anywhere between 3,000-7,000!!! You could also add some HSB, NP, WE and SMB. They'll do a number on the carp YOY also, and will add variety for your own sake.

In my scenario (and contrary to Nates suggestion... which he knows a lot more than me!), assuming you stock a huge amount of LMB I would NOT feed initially. Bass from a hatchery will be pellet trained, which means they'll happily munch on pellets and will eat fewer young carp. Besides, why give carp an additional food source to thrive on? BUT, if you are going to target them heavily by rod and reel (meaning having LOTS and LOTS of people do so... not just you on the weekends), getting them piled up in a specific area would help that cause.

I would avoid green sunfish. In fact, I would wait to stock any additional forage fish until I had a pretty good feeling that the carp population was under control. I would have an annual shock survey done so I could have some data to compare year to year. You want the predators going after baby carp, not other forage. Greenies would target some of the small carp, but I think they'd add more problems than they removed. Frankly though, with a BOW the size of yours, some have probably found their way in already anyway from other BOW's upstream.

Down the road (when you get closer to a balance), you could look at adding all sorts of fun stuff (in advanced sizes). Bluegill, redear, pumpkinseed, rockbass, yellow perch, golden shiners, etc.

Here's a modification of a previous suggestion: stock muskie fingerlings. They cost a fraction of what the adults do, and as carp don't eat much in the way of fish, they would have a good chance of survival. Also, it's common for state game and fish agencies to stock fingerling fish even in lakes with significant predator populations, and have the new fish survive and establish; oftentimes we think we have to stock larger fish if there are already fish present, and while it is preferable, it isn't the only way; all fish born in the wild in any lake or stream start out as fry, and a fair number of them live every year. Muskie are far and away a more aggressive predator than bass, and they also grow several times larger and thus can eat larger carp; a forty-inch muskie could easily eat a fifteen-inch carp, and there are probably more carp that size in the lake than there are huge ones.

It would still be wise to fish out as many as possible of the larger ones in any way possible, but I'd bet a lot of money that some tiger or pure-strain muskie would put a hurting on those carp, and thin them by fifty percent or more within four or five years. Then once you get them thinned, you can stock more bass, and the bass will help in keeping down recruitment. But it does you no good at all to curb recruitment if you've still got thousands of adult carp in the lake.

What about starting a bowfishing tournament, and making it a weekly event? There's got to be some bowfishermen somewhere in the area that would love to get on that lake at night with a few spotlights.

Weissguy make a good point with the electrofishing boat. A few days of that could maybe bag hundreds of carp?

Any experts on that? Do the shock boats bring up the carp?

good ideas all! my lake is very shallow ( 5'avg and 12'max) i dont know if muskies/pike will live in the summer when the water temp reaches 83f?? will they? and where is a good place to purchase muskies/pike/lmb????

You can get carp electrofishing by the boat load when they are spawning! Otherwise it would depend on the depths of the lake. Even if you get them by the boat load, I still think that in 200 acres you are just harvesting a renewable resource that just wont end.

Walt, I would highly disagree with your theory of stocking small fish and their survival rate. If a lake or pond has a fish population established, most of the time you will spend more money stocking smaller fish than larger ones, and you will get a much better survival into adulthood by stocking less of the bigger fish. Lots of fish do indeed make it to adulthood by natural reproduction, but that is out of hundreds of thousands fry and fingerlings. If we were talking percentages, probably only 1% of fish hatched make it to adulthood. Especially Muskies, their fingerlings are so dumb that even when they are 12 inches long a bass can swim right up to them, open its mouth and have a nice skinny snack.

ps. i used to love the carp but i got REAL sick of them after not being able to catch more than 5 bass in the last 3 years! i looked at the bottom of the lake for days with "fish tv" and saw only 2 bass and no aquatic plants in the main body:(

question: can i just buy a few hundred 4" bass every year? will that at-least give me some keeper bass to catch each season??

Normally I would not recommend stocking fingerlings in a lake with an established population of fish, Nate - I agree with you a hundred percent on that. I made my suggestion based on Scott's assessment that carp make up 70% of the biomass of the lake; and now that he mentions that he saw only two bass in the main body of the lake over a two-day period with an underwater camera, it is probably safe to conclude that LMB have not successfully spawned in at least three or four years if not longer, and that there are not many left in the lake. The fact that carp don't eat fish to a significant extent, and they're the main fish present in the lake, makes it very reasonable to expect that a good percentage of muskie fingerlings would survive.

The other reason I made my suggestion was simply the cost factor, as a response intended to mitigate the potential problem you alluded to of how much 400 12" muskie would cost ($6000 to be exact, not including shipping or delivery).

To answer your question, Scott, the bass aren't going to do well until you get the carp under control, because carp outgrow the size at which bass can utilize them as prey, extremely quickly, and the bass are simply going to be starving until you get most of the carp out of there and replace them not just with bass but also (as you correctly surmised) bluegill or some other prey species that stays prey-size longer, for the bass to feed on.