Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Stocking idea for very small crappie pond

Normally pondmeisters manage for crappies by having a lot of small LMB to keep them from overpopulating. My understanding is that this combo doesn't work well in small bodies of water because LMB spawn so late in the year that the yoy crappie get large enough to eat the newborn bass fry so a particularly large crappie spawn can completely liberate them from predation. So I've been brainstorming an alternative stocking plan for small water crappie and here's what I came up with:

Black crappie (main target)
Redfin pickerel (or chain?)
Yellow perch
mudminnows
White bullhead
Golden shiners
Gambusia (pickerel forage to keep them from competing with crappies)
SMB (maybe, if extra predator needed)
Pumpkinseed or redear (maybe, if snail control desired)

The idea is that the pickerel, perch, and mudminnows spawn first. When the crappie do lay their eggs, they get gobbled up by the white bullhead, bigger golden shiners, and others. When the remainder hatch they find that the pre-existing yoy have eaten all the fry-food in the shallows, and largely starve out. The survivors then head out into open waters where the larger golden shiners gobble them up. After growing for a while filter feeding they return to the shallows where they can feast on young perch/ golden shiners/ etc. SMB could be added if needed to control crappie numbers, but I worry they would compete with the crappie for fish forage. Pumpkinseeds or redears might be desired to help eliminate snail-born parasites in perch bonus catches.

Is an approach like this viable?

Multi-species interactions are difficult to predict. Although I can't offer any insights that I would have any confidence in as to how all of them would interact ... it is potentially viable. I think the approach is interesting. The earlier spawning of the predators (pickerel and SMB) and prey should as you have suggested help them relative to the crappie and have a limiting effect on crappie.

Ultimately, the key to crappie control is a good predator capable keeping up with crappie reproduction. With a small pond, I think one wants to reduce the number of participants particularly for any fish that may compete with crappie for food. Bass are a good choice for a small pond and as long as one doesn't have them all concentrated in a single year class that can be here one fall and gone the next spring they can keep up with them.

Crappie will eat a lot of their own young. In a small pond where there is a good standing weight of crappie they will consume as many crappie fry as LMB do and perhaps more. But there still needs to be a larger predator that thins the sizes between 2" and the minimum harvest length. 16" to 20" predators are ideal for this work.

Crappie will rarely attain standing weights in excess of 150 lbs/acre and typically they are more like LMB in terms of standing weight. From this perspective, they are a poor forage fish for LMB even though they seem to be quite prolific. It doesn't take a lot 16" to 20" LMB to control crappie provided most of the standing weight of crappie are of harvestable size.

Sounds like a really interesting idea. I'm sure we'd all love to hear how it goes if you go through with it. I'd think there would be pretty big difference in your results depending on whether you went with redfin pickerel versus chain pickerel. Chain pickerel tend to get substantially larger than the redfin and would probably do a better job of controlling your prey species. How big is your pond?