Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Golden Shiners - What size to stock?

To my experience they move like small shiners. Shiners have that characteristic swimming habit - quick and jerky.

I caught a small bass on video trying to eat a shiner about 1/2 its size.

Still no confirmed spawning with my shiners. They look healthy but I am suspecting they are sterile or something.

It's my first year really looking at the baby fish and trying to see what has or hasn't spawned and my experience so far is that I'm 100% guessing at everything I see. There is good news here to though.

In one of my first posts after seeing something I couldn't explain at the pond (looked like pepper in the water) I took several photos of the dark spots went home and airplayed the photos on the TV in the living room. The wind was blowing from the SE that day and the waves and the USO's were showing up along the riprap at the NW corner (immediately North of the spawning area). I was able to zoom in on these black specs and to my inexperienced eyes thought I could make out double dots (eyes) and faint outlines of body shapes of small fish. I suspected these were larval fish that had just hatched. They were not swimming, just seemed to be drifting with the water and waves. Whatever they were, they were tiny.

In the following days my wife and I would spend some time at the feeder and walk the edges of the pond (mostly along the riprap edges of the shallows and along the North side of the pond). What we could see at the feeder was a small flash almost like glitter in the water catching the light. There one moment and gone the next. I found that if I got close to the pond edge, kneeled down and remained still while focusing on the water I could see these little flashes were actually baby fish maybe 1/8 - 1/4" long. The flashes were sunlight reflecting off the sides of the babies.

Now the hunt was on! I showed my wife this and the two of us sat there mesmerized by these little swimmers. No idea what species they were but we did confirm that they were indeed there. As we walked the pond edge we could see various ages of these little fish. Some were a little more advanced and some were in a small school not really swimming but hovering next to some adjacent structure (riprap, weeds, and boat) All of them were in really shallow water. Almost all of them were invisible until we stopped moving and really focused on the water. It was almost like looking about one of the prints where you look at it for a time and then the image would reveal itself.

We do still see these little nearly invisible newly hatched fish along with schools of 1,000's of varying sizes of more advanced fry. I'm sure there are various fish in the new spawns as we are now seeing different body shapes in the water.

Look close to your structure/habitat that is right at the pond edge. I wish I had a picture or a video to share but trying to take a photo of a needle in the water is just not possible with my current equipment. My understanding of GSH spawn is that they are "almost needlelike" in the water.