Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat Spawning Discs/Saucers

Spawning Discs/Saucers ?

Has anyone had any actual experience with them good, bad, or indifferent? Is there an article somewhere?

My pond pond bottom is either clay that squeezes up through your toes or soft thick black sucking muck. The pond is over populated with small LMB & under populated with forage size bream. Thought the saucers would increase the spawning success of the bream & help bring the pond into balance more quickly. I have an idea for saucers @ $10.00 each. I do not want to spin my wheels & waste my time & money.

If you put in plastic disks, make sure that they are heavier than water. I put a couple of (4" high" ends of plastic 55 gallon drums in my SMB pond, filled with pea gravel. In 2-3 years, the SMB had worked enough pea gravel out of them that they floated up.

Lots of plastic is buoyant; I suggest permanently attaching weights to the bottoms.

Weed barrier fabric and cinder blocks are awfully cheap. If you are creating your beds on a slope, then something is probably needed (like a row of cinder blocks) on the downslope end, so your bedding sand/gravel mixture does not migrate off your fabric and into the muck over time. In fact, any heavy, insoluble junk at your property could both serve as your weights on the fabric and make some additional surface area for your periphyton. If the brick, rocks, etc. has any holes or crevices, then that is additional structure for the organisms that are the next size larger.

If your water levels are variable from spawning season to spawning season, then you could do some strip spawning beds at a few different depths.

Of course, if your water level does go way down, then any exposed "junk" you used to create the spawning beds need to be acceptable to view by the pond users!

Good luck on your spawning bed project!

Can you afford enough saucers to provide habitat for all the BG to spawn, or would your money be more wisely spent on what FishingRod suggested, i.e. Geotextile fabric covered with pea gravel so the gravel doesn't sink down into the mud/clay?