Pond Boss Forums FISH & FISHING Sunfish-Including Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass What's up with my Redears?

Would like to get some RES established in my pond, so yesterday I picked up 75 from the fishtruck, got 'em home, carefully acclimated them, and then put them in my fish cage. They are all 2.5 to 3.5", but I've got LMB up to 14" and CC up to 23" that were stocked 2 yrs ago, so I'd like to let the RES grow some more before releasing.

All in all I think everything went smoothly and they were in the cage about an hour after picking them up. Although I noticed 3 or 4 that were starting to go belly-up, the rest looked good...


Today, however, I was surprised to find 12 dead and many others that appeared lathargic and were developing redness along the base of fins...



So what do you think is up? All other fish in the pond seem healthy, so do you think they were stressed too much or for some reason are not getting enough dissolved O2?

Probably not a DO issue, transportation/handling stress would be my guess.

Yes handling stress. Your water is probably fairly warm this time of year too which doesn't help. Not the best time of year to be transporting fish.

Putting them in a cage won't help either. What do you plan on feeding them? Redear are rarely feed trained.

The best thing for stressed fish is to put them in a pond ASAP and get them feeding ASAP, which in this case is natural feed. Being cooped up in a cage with no food won't cut it,

Yeah, I know, the people on the truck assured me they had been raised on floating pellets. I didn't really believe them, but after looking at some fish, I couldnt' resist giving it a try. This morning they were looking lots better, but its been 2 days now in the cage and I haven't see 'em take a single pellet , so they're on their own now. Hope they got sense to find some cover and don't get et!

At least they look to actually be RES and not GSF or hybrids...

"At least they look to actually be RES and not GSF or hybrids... "

You said a mouth full there.

I have a sneaky suspicion all the same size GSF I have been catching out of my old pond are actually what I stocked from the fish truck that were supposed to be RES. The growth in size would correspond about right. The larger size ones it was easier to tell when we put them in the pond. But the really small ones, I could not tell. That is why they went in my old pond that already had some GSF. Only the RES I could ID for sure went where it mattered a lot.

Similar thing happened to me when I originally stocked the new pond 2 yrs ago. Thought I was getting BG and RES from hatchery, but they were only 1" and I didn't notice anything until they got big enough to catch. Then they were about 3-4" and didn't look like BG or RES so I posted pictures here and found out I had HBG instead. We were catching very few BG and I can't remember catching any RES. So last summer we began bucket stocking from a nearby lake that had real nice looking BG. This latest attempt was to try to get some RES going. Hopefully in the not so distant future, these fish will out-breed the HBG and I'll eventually end up with what I wanted in the first place. We'll see...