Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose How bad are Green Sunfish for a bass pond?

Over populated bass pond.

Original plan was to remove all green sunfish.

I just left a clients home who has a loaded green sunfish pond.

Of the sunfish I have caught in my pond have been over 10 inches long , These are closer to 4 to 6 inches long.

I bet we could trap over 200 in an hour. Tonight I made 10 casts and caught 10

I personally dont have a problem with GSF. I would also think LMB might prefer them as forage due to their body form over BG, as long as they are the right size in relationship to your bass (approximately 1/3 the base's length.

If they are too big for the bass to eat, then you should remove the largest GSF until you consistently catch the right size for your average bass to eat.

You never said...how big are your bass?

My bass are less than 12 inches (mostly 10). 90% of the GSF I have caught have been bigger than 75% of the bass.

My client told me to come take as many as I want. I caught any from 3 inches to 5 inches at her house today.

I have a friend with two clover traps, and a 55 gallon drum with aeration.

I still want to put adult BG as well, but no one is selling them at the moment.

You probably wont find many adult BG for sale until after the breeding season this fall. You may be able to trap some out of another location and bucket stock them tho.

Trapping works well on smaller GSF. I'd leave those 3" fish in the pond. A 10" bass can easily eat them. Remove anything bigger. I seldom catch larger GSF in my traps, tho. You may just have to keep fishing them out. Dry dog food in a plastic bottle works well.

The females only spawn once a season so their numbers should be easy to control once you've removed the bigger fish.

I like GSF as a supplement to BG. I have a 3/8 acre pond at the back of my place. It started with BG with some GSF. Now, it's mostly GSF with about 15 cats. I've never had a problem with them.

I think the GSF would make a very good forage base for LMB, but what you have is the traditional aged pond with too many bass and not enough forage AND/OR pond capacity. If you want the larger bass, you will need to remove a good number of the small LMB. This leaves more GSF per predator yielding faster predator growth. For example, my 1/4 acre HBG/HSB pond only has 40 HSB in it. They were put in to control HBG recruitment. My intentions are to grow bigger HBG, however. A trophy bass pond could have more bass in it, but you would need some panfish (BG and GSF) to produce the bass forage, and spend a fair amount of time removing the smaller bass that will just keep coming and coming. In your situation, if bigger bass are your goals, you could start removing some of the bigger GSF as well. They are too big for the bass to eat and just taking up bio-space and consuming food that the bass could utilize.

There's alot of variable to consider, but that's my two cents to get the "goals" conversation going. Another thing to think about is managing for a large panfish pond...you are almost there if the BIG LMB dream is not too ingrained.