Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Stocking a one acre pond

I had my 50 year old pond dry up last year and now I am in the process of restocking. The pond is about 28 feet deep and one acre surface area I am moving fatheads and golden shiners from my other pond. Should be about thirty thousand fhm and several hundred shiners. I'm thinking about adding some rainbow trout to see if they will survive the summer without predators in the pond. I plan to and bluegill and red ear sunfish and wait to see how it goes before adding a predator species. Either c cat's or large mouth bass. My question is if the trout survive would cat's be an effective predator. I plan to feed and also harvest

It depends on how many cats and how big they are. If the water is cold enough for the trout to survive, I doubt that you will get any reproduction from the cats and probably not a lot of growth. The cats like warmer water, the trout only like water to the upper 60's.

I hope with that depth I can try night time aeration to keep the o2 levels up in the cooler water. I removed almost all of the organic debris from the pond. So I am hopeful that my water will stay in good shape as far as o2 is concerned.

I had a lot of cats in the 10-18 pound range so I know that I can have some decent sized ones that will enjoy the shallower parts of the pond

If the surface water is much over 70°F, it won't work to keep the trout alive. Been there, done that and it didn't work.

Esshup thanks for the response. I think I will add a few it will give me something to feed and watch for at least a few months. After all it's only money. I have a definite thermocline in my pond so I try it for the heck of it. And if you are right I will bow to your superior knowledge

Good luck on your trout experiment!

I like that your pond is 28' deep at full pool. You will have a pool of cool of water below the thermocline to work with.

I don't like that your deep pond went dry during the drought. I suspect you probably have zero groundwater entering the pond to cool the water during summer. Therefore, your pondwater temperature will rise as the air (and soil) warms throughout the summer.

To keep your trout alive, you will have to perform a very delicate balancing act.

The cool water below the thermocline will be ABLE to hold more dissolved oxygen, but it will be oxygen depleted to some extent due to the stratification of the pond.

I have linked a dissolved oxygen chart to show the temperature relationship.



You will need a temperature probe and oxygen probe to establish the depth profiles of temp and DO.

Consider two identical ponds with the same temperature in June. The first pond is aerated from the deepest point to mix the cool deep waters with the warmer surface waters. The second pond is allowed to remain in its naturally stratified state.

The average temperature of the stratified pond will be lower in the period from July through August compared to the aerated pond. A pond that has the hottest water at the surface will gain less heat during a summer day and lose more heat during the night compared to a fully-mixed pond

Therefore, I don't believe aerating from the deepest point is your best solution. The pond with the cooler average temperature will be able to hold more dissolved oxygen for the trout, but as you add oxygen via aeration, then you will also be warming the pond.

You will have to use your cool bottom water to slightly cool your column of well-oxygenated water above. You may have to run some shallow aeration 24/7, and then turn on some deeper aeration in the late night/early morning during the hottest parts of the summer. Perhaps you can lower that aeration a foot/week from 14' to 22' during the hottest 8 weeks of the year for your water temps.

There are several threads on the forum where people have had to work very carefully to balance their DO and temperature via aeration - usually due to pushing right up to the upper limits of how many fish could be supported in a pond of a given size. (You might try searching for some of those old threads. I believe most of them are in the Aeration sub-forum.)

I would keep lots of records and experiment with a small number of trout like you proposed. I really like your idea to run the experiment with no predators. That is the only way to determine if you lost your trout due to insufficient DO.

If you posted your weekly data from this year in the Aeration section, then I bet you could get some valuable input from some of the experts.

If you can get trout to survive in Year 1, then you can go big on your trout in subsequent years and also add LMB as you may desire!

The problem is getting O2 to the cold water below the thermocline. Vertex has a system in the works that will do that (the OST system), but it's not developed enough yet for commercial sale - it's still in the "work out the bugs" stage. It works, and works well for oxygenating the lower reaches of a pond without disrupting the thermocline, but the materials to make the system and methods to install the system are being revamped due to poor supplies from Covid-19.

With that system you can twist a knob and increase the O2 levels at the bottom of the pond where the cool water is and have 2 different fisheries in a deep pond, a warm water fishery on top and a cool water fishery on the bottom.

It can also be made with an alum injector as part of the system so that people with high nutrient loads can lock up the excess nutrients. They can go from having 18" visibility to having 60" visibility just by dialing a knob to regulate the amount of alum going into a pond. Depending on the alkalinity of the pond, it can be either buffered or unbuffered alum.

It is NOT a DIY system, and never will be. The proprietary info that I know prohibits me from saying much more about it other than it uses a pump to pump water from the bottom of the pond, circulates it thru a system that adds O2 to it and the water is returned back to the bottom of the pond without changing the water temp or disrupting the thermocline.

That sounds like an interesting system I will have to keep my eyes that system

I added fifty 8-10" rainbow trout am feeding trout food and adding fhm and GSH from my bait fish pond. I'm wondering when I can add bg and res to make sure my minnows have a good chance of reproducing. Sunfish will be in the two inch range

What habitat do you have in the pond to facilitate the minnow reproduction? FHM and GSH require different spawning habitat.

I have installed on pallet stack and other overhead structures for the fhm. There is some emerging grass and other vegetation. There is also some submerged pond weeds for cover for the newly hatched fry

That will help.

Should I go ahead and stock some bg and res

The BG and RES won't hurt, but you will need to stock some LMB once the BG pull off a spawn.

Thanks for the response I am going to put in 150 BG and 50 RES. I think I will try CC as a predator when the need arises right now I will just pellet feed and harvest severely