Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Offspring Already? (update 7-3-17)

I put 500 Hybrid Blue Gill, 200 Redear Bream and 10# minnows in my new 3/4 acre pond back in October. While checking the overflow pipe the other day I noticed a lot of minnows in the eroded puddle under the pipe on the backside of the dam. Today I took a dip net out to put the minnows back in the pond and was surprised to see they were small fish, not minnows. I didn't realize the fish would reproduce so quick!
I'm just not sure if they are Blue Gill or not. Please help identify, thanks.
Link to video of me catching them.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e8bjgksu8sz2dqf/2017-02-06%2019.37.45.mp4?dl=0

IMO not BG. Maybe GSF? Does your pond over flow run to a creek or other BOW?

How big were the RES? To me thoses look like young of the year (YOY) BG or RES.

No. my pond runoff is on dry ground for several hundred yards before it drains into a creek in the woods and my pond is only feed by watershed from approx 10 acres.
That would be a "ton" of GSF for a pond less than a year old, wouldn't it?

The Redear Bream were probably 2" on average, much bigger than these little things.
If I have this many in this little puddle, I can't imagine how many are in the pond.
I am planning on putting bass in the pond during the spring.

Edit: After reviewing a picture of the fish as we put them in the pond (see other post below) the fish were quit a bit bigger than 2".

GSF are green sunfish. They would happily come from the creek to your over flow pipe when water is flowing between the two points. Have you had any rain events where you've had over flow from the pond running across the ground to the creek?

I doubt your 2 inch RES and BG have spawned since October.

Thanks for the GSF definition, lol. I found the acronym page also.

No, literally impossible for my pond to connect with any other body of water. For instance, we had a 1000 year flood in this area (South Louisiana) last year after my pond was built and my pond still did not connect with any other water.

Someone bucket stocked your pond.

One of your old posts was this:
'I just built a 3/4 acre water shed pond. Has about 10-15 acres runoff to it. Deepest parts are 8 - 9 ft with one end being 2 ft or less in places. This was already a low area that water ran through my property.
Now I am working on creating cover for fish (Bass, Sac-a-Lait, Bluegill, Catfish) before the pond fills.'

Water runs through this low area where you pond was? Was it dry ground before you began building the pond?

RES reach sexually maturity around the 5" mark and a late fall spawn would not be be unheard of. Based on your stocking size I am thinking someone may have bucket stocked your pond or some fish made their way in during a high water event.

The picture below is a mix of RES and golden shiners (GSH) from my pond. At small sizes different types of sunfish are hard to tell apart.

I've seen and worked with lots of small GSF and those are not young GSF. In your video there was at least one fathead minnow flipping in the net. This indicates to me that all these fish came from the pond. It is remotely possible that in LA when there was a fish stocking in October that a few of the stocked fish were large enough to spawn. Sunfish especially those raised in the South can easily spawn at 2.5"-3" long and several of your stockers were likely that large.

Those small fingerlings could be small RES. Keep a good eye on what grows this year to get a better view of them as larger individuals. These small sunfish with ample food could easily be 5"-7" long by October 2017. Catch some of them and provide more pictures to this thread for the 'rest of the story'. When you add your bass latter this year try to locate some that are 3X longer than those small sunfish which means at least some bass 4"-6" long. These larger bass will grow really well on those small sunfish.

I cannot stress enough, this pond has not connected with any other body of water! Also, no one has bucket stocked it either. This pond is in a remote area and I have multiple trail cameras around it.
Thanks for the reply and picture.

Thanks for the reply Bill, I will keep this post updated.

The area I built the pond was a natural water shed area, never held water and does NOT connect to other water.
No one bucket stocked my pond.
Thanks for the reply.

Did your game cameras capture footage of any herons or kingfishers around the pond?

If the fish came from the stocker then it is possible that the stocker stocked more than you bargained for?

If you can get a current sampling of 4-5" fish that were from the original stocking then we may have a theory that is supported by the facts. Can you put out more stationary fish traps? Try fishing for sunfish with tiny hook and worm?

The sooner you know the answers to these questions the better we can help you decide if you will meet your goals or if you have been dealt a change in plans by the invisible bucket stocker, raccoon who dropped both a male and female adult fish at the same time, or if a GBH burped as he banked over your pond.

Trust me, we aren't picking on you, it just seems all bodies of water have fish show up in them and we all have our ideas how it happened. I would have been in your camp insisting that bucket stocking isn't possible, but later I found out that it does happen despite our best intentions.

The good news is that if you find fish mature enough to spawn and your growing conditions are good enough that you can get this much growth this quickly then you will be having a bonanza of fish and will have plenty of interesting balancing dilemmas in the future as you plan for your future predator/forage balance.

Keep us posted with pictures and your trap experience. Galvanized Gee traps painted in earthtone colors are good. I have had some good success with some cheap ebay pyramid and circle style minnow soft fabric mesh traps for all sizes of fish.

They could easily be RES or cross HBG X RES fry. In newly stocked southern ponds sunfish will try to spawn ASAP. Often at 3-4 inches. With the warm weather that is the most likely situation.

Interesting. I knew BG could spawn at less than a year of age but I thought RES needed to be in their second year to reach sexual maturity like PS.

I missed in the original post that the stockers were HBG not BG. Theoretically, about 25 of the HBG stocked were female. Maybe the little fish in the pic are just HBG F2 (HBG X HBG)?

you will have Georgia Giants :-)

Out of curiosity, I wanted to read up on YOY RES spawning and my attempt to find info is coming up blank. Does anybody have a link to a site(s) with that info. Everything I keep finding says they are not sexually mature enough to spawn until age 2. Here's a few of the sites I've checked out. I suspect there is an "It Depends" somewhere in the discussion but I can't find it.

http://fisheries.tamu.edu/pond-management/species/redear-sunfish/

http://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/species/sunfish/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242253727_Maturation_and_Fecundity_01_Redear_Sunfish


Thanks!

Those fish look similar to hybrids to me. The vertical bars are indicative, as is mouth size. Mouth of those little critters is slightly larger than a redear or bluegills. Those babies are definitely not green sunfish, nor bluegills. They look similar to baby redear sunfish, except for those vertical bars and slightly larger mouth. My bet is hybrid.

Thanks for chiming in Bob,

Do you have experience that YOY RES are sexually mature enough to spawn? I have been hesitant to say in this thread that the babies have RES genes just because my understanding, until now at least, is RES do not typically reach sexual maturity until age 2 but definitely not less than 1 year of age. I guess my assumption up to now is that sexual maturity of any species (fish or animal) is a function of age with a +/- , not necessarily a function of size. Is that wrong when it comes to fish?

Thanks,

Bill D.

BillD. Here are your rerferences for RES spawning late in their 1st yr of life:
1. Wilbur, R,L.1969. The redear sunfish in Florida. Fla. Game Freshwater Fish Comm. Fish Bull. 5:1-64.
2. Brown H.W. 1951. Results of stocking largemouth bass and channel catfish in experimental Texas farm ponds. Trans. Am. Fish. Soc, 80:210-217.
Normally spawning occurs in the 2nd yr as you are see in your sources.

IMO Bob L has the best guess. These are offspring of the HBG who can grow and mature quickly at small sizes.

Bill, I have been working on sexing RES and as a general rule of thumb I wouldn't try to sex a RES under 5-1/2" in length, the results are just too iffy. With that said could they sexual mature at smaller size? My guess is yes they could and I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen in a newly stocked pond that lacks large mature male RES. We know that the presence of large male BG can suppress the sexual maturity of smaller male BG, I'm guessing RES follow a similar pattern. Age, size, and for the lack of a better term, "social structure", can play a role when sexual maturity starts.

Thanks Bill!

I haven't found those actual papers yet but I have found many others that refer to them. Thanks so much for digging them up!

I think some are crosses and some RES as noted above. They are not all the same. Chances of HBG spawning all those in that small area are not large as they are mostly male and studies on HBG find few offspring even in ponds with no predation (only a couple thousand ) in entire ponds.

Thanks for all the help!!
I found this picture I took of my wife and I letting the fish go into the pond October 19, 2016. Gives a good idea of the size in the first pic.