Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Raising Forage and Bait spotfin shiner

Great that current is not required. Hoping to add SFS this spring and wait a few years so i can move some to my 4th pond as well.

Hello.

This is what I have seen.

Take a log of wood about 8 inches in diameter an about 2 feet long, and you make saw cuts of 2 inches and a half all around at about every inch.

And screw a stell plate in the bottom to make it stall

With a table saw it's done very well

Notice, I never saw the results.
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Hello.

Here is the Video

https://uwspedu-my.sharepoint.com/:...Rqi6iV18B2SHpNQ0cOQTltzY98rcvgg?e=xwiVnY
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Just planning to throw in logs (already have added spruce and sycamore).

Get out the old CD's and an orbital sander? Scuff them up with 36-60 grit, paint 'em with epoxy paint, some PVC tube larger than the center hole, cut it into donuts. Use a threaded rod and nuts/washers to make stacks of CD's???

Prospective spotfin pond

Great pic. That is the first shot I have ever seen that captures German Shepherds on their spawning beds!


That water does look pretty fertile. Hopefully, the spotfins will be a good addition to your food chain.

I am no fish ID expert by any means, but those don't look like spotfin shiners to me.

FishinRod - That water color is not algae but rather minerals or clay. Our new pond water always looks like this, but this pond has held this color for longer than the 1st 2 ponds did. Perhaps this is because it gets virtually no runoff. My private Caribbean sea!

Omaha - These guys are doing a fish survey:)

RAH - you say you have plenty of SFS already in another pond? How did you source them if you can share that and how are they doing in your caribbean water chemistry? I know they tend to like certain ph and alkalinity. If they are doing well in your other ponds then they should be fine with a little extra fertility and fish food in your 3rd pond. I feed optimal ( I mix the bluegill jr and the bluegill sizes together) and it all is cleaned up before it sinks.

They attack it with a veangence and I think it helps that they have plenty of high quality protein in their diet. I hand feed and do not have time every night so it is truly still a supplemental feed for them. I also have lots of other invertebrates, backswimmers, baby live snails (believe it or not when they pop out of momma snail they are so small that the SFS could easily get them in their mouth), lots of dragon fly larvae and other 'wigglers' in various shapes and sizes.

I forgot that German Shepherds are a working breed!


Clays can have a very complex mineralogy. Have you performed a water chemistry test on that pond?

A little bit of mitigation now, may help your fish a great deal in the future.

canyoncreek - I do not have any SFS yet. I have lake chubsuckers in my 2nd pond and added some to my 3rd pond. I plan to catch SFS locally.

FishinRod - I have not done any real water analysis, but expect this pond to be like my first 2 in which the fish do well. Alkalinity is high based on a hot-tub test kit. Our dogs fit the bill for why we got them. We sleep well at night.

Bill Cody, please look at lower RH photo of fish in slide 15 (could be slide 14 actually..)... Do these look correct to you?????????????

SNIPE, I'm with you on that. I was going through that slide deck and I glanced at that picture and said, oops, wrong picture got in the deck. Those fish look nothing like my adult SFS unless some chemical treatment or some bad disease happened. I think if we had the audio to that slide they may have explained that better but I'm thinking they are not SFSs or why they look that way

Snipe - those fish in slide 14-15 I think were problematic fish that died for some reason. Not sure about a positive ID. From a distance they resemble SFS but the red fins are completely incorrect for healthy SFS. The scales on those fish are similar to SFS body side scales. As canyoncreek says maybe some chemical treatment or disease caused the red fins?? Those shiners in the picture appear to be too big for large red shiners and redfin shiners. Although a dead fish slide could have been inserted just as an example of Problems and Dead Fish??

I was not impressed with the slide presentation because it could have been a lot more informative with more details. The variety of spawning devices have evolved more since 2005-2007. Those cedar shingle spawn plates were used in a publication back in 1992 by a Sea Grant researcher here in Ohio. In the mid1990's I used those cedar shingle plates as described in the article and the referenced Power Point presentation. I did not like the shingles because they decomposed too quickly when underwater and the gap spacing between plates was too hard to make consistent widths. Ohio Aquaculture received grant money to set up a small satellite facility near me in the late 1990's early 2000's to study feasibility of spawning SFS as bait fish. That operator used plastic plates with washers or O rings as spacers. One of his goals was to try and spawn SFS year round. I don't think results were ever published due to operational problems.

Dang you guys are wealth of information!

I think there is enough know how, determination, and opportunity with members of this forum that we should continue to research, share experiences and try to get a large population going. We can share our successes and if some bait operator somewhere wants to start selling SFS I think it would take off. They are very hardy and very lively. I would think any angler who would buy a 3-4" shiner for bait for pike fishing or for big bass would be happy with these. They don't seem to be as sensitive to warmer water or handling. I don't know how they do if they were in a bait bucket with a dropping dissolved O2 though.

Maybe more PB forum folk can find in their local streams, set up spawning structures and see if eggs are deposited and transport the eggs to their ponds as a way to bring home their own SFS.

Bill if you have other ideas for homemade spawning structures, please give us your ideas.

I made my spawning structures per Brian Zimmerman by stacking CD's with washers between creating varying thickness. I made 11 structures from 40-150 CD's tall. I also used 1/4" and 3/16" ceramic tile stacked and glued with alternating sides off-center and placed on top of cinder blocks. When I lowered and seined my forage pond last fall I collected 6 SFS out of hundreds of pounds of BNM, RSH and a few FHM. I believe in my case, my forage pond (we need abbreviation for that, I think FP will work ) has no current and is really not big enough to have wind action even and I "think" a bit of water movement would help. Of those 6 collected, they were mostly male, bright, beautiful blue and were all about 5" in length. Girls were about 4, maybe 4.5" and very silvery. I guess I had 2 of 6 girls..

Wonder if "lava rocks" would be good spawning structure? https://www.lowes.com/pd/Universal-6-Lb-Lava-Rock/1002678596

I doubt lava rocks would work as well as what is considered the standard method of stacked plates with gaps between plates. This type of structure mimics bark peeling away from trees which is what SFS mainly use in nature for deposition of eggs. I am not sure current is all that beneficial for egg development UNLESS there are a lot of suspended solids in the water that can coat eggs and decrease or restrict DO movement into the single layers of developing eggs. Current would help keep water moving around the eggs. Lava rocks with the small divot like holes would collect adhesive eggs in the holes, although I question how much water movement and oxygenation the eggs would receive. Also I wonder if the SFS would even use the porous lava rock as a place to deposit eggs. May experience is the SFS are pretty instinctively selective as to where the male establishes a territory as a location for the egg laying ritual. Instinct can be pretty influential. Even the spacing gap of width of the crevice is critical to these fish. I have very good success with what has worked very well.

There is a small scale fish grower near me that produces SFS for the local bait and some pond stocking. He is on a learning curve adventure with this. When I need higher numbers of the SFS I go to him for 100s to 1,000s. . At this point he does not ship any stage of SFS as it it too much trouble collecting, boxing, and delivering the package to the shipper.

RAH you are very welcome to experiment with the lava rock idea and method. I am very interested in the test results.

Thanks for the further explanation. Since I will likely release any SFS directly into the pond, I will probably never know where they spawn (if they do). I already have some dead spruce trees and sycamore logs in the pond, so the SFS may spawn there. I have some old lava rocks that were given to me, so I cannot see any harm in adding them too. Right now, the water is frozen up, and I am hoping the past snow cover on top of the ice did not kill fish. In my LMB/BG pond, this happened pretty heavily once a while back, and to a lesser degree a second time. The more severe winter kill eliminated CC in that pond, which was OK with me. Next job will to frost seed some switchgrass on the new dam (waterside) of the 4th pond when it looks like the weather will cycle from below freezing to above freezing. Will also start some plugs in case the frost seeding fails.

This seems alot easier for them. No clue what kind of fish these are. But its funny.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterri..._medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Bill,

I just ordered some acrylic platters that I plan to use as described below. I'll post up the process and parts as I get them done. Thank you for the very informative email you sent.

I'm thinking thru the process, I'm a first timer, so please add/ delete / change anything that doesn't fit with your 30 years of experience with SFS

(sorry I tried to indent the list but it taking out the spaces)

? is there a 'sweet spot' on the number of crevices, ie., platters that should be in the stack
- Soak the platters in a watershed that has spotfins
? How often should they be checked, moved to the pond
- remove the Platter Stack and bring back via a aerated conveyance
? do the Platter Stacks need to remain vertical or can they be laid horizontal for transportation
- submerge platter stack in pond
? How long should they be soaked in the pond
? Any guidance on where in pond the platters should soaked for the eggs to hatch, deep/shallow water, shade/sun
? how long from Fry to Breeding for SFS - in other words should I leave platters in the pond with no adults over summer or keep trying for eggs?

Thanks much Stressless/

Is a CD made out of acrylic? I"m thinking cheapest option is a stack of blank CDs or DVDs? I see you can get colored ones (blue, or they make ones that look like LP records with black outside and colored interior ring). In my pond we get enough silt that what ever color the disk is it wouldn't stay that color very long. I'll search for other spawning structures too. Probably any plastic would work.

Males in spawning color are so beautiful!

I have waded out to my spawning structures which I mounted on a threaded rod with hex nut in between each CD and then pushed the long end of the threaded rod into the pond bottom. I could then rock the platter stack back and forth in the water to try to clean the silt off the disks and presumably the eggs. I don't know if silt prevent eggs from hatching and the silt comes from rain events with runoff into the pond. This is where if I could figure out how to keep a little water moving over the spawning structures it would probably help the eggs survive.

Hello.

If I take rocks and I do saw cuts, how deep do I have to do my cuts 1or2inches and how far apart.
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