Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain tilapia only pond for bait?

So I am helping my neighbor down the street with his two ponds. One is 4.4 acres depth between 4 - 8 ft, beautiful pond with clear water, a lot of weeds, and stunted bass. Starting on weeds then will move to fish.

He has another 1/2 acre pond into the wood that overflows into the 4.4 acre pond. The 1/2 acre pond has an average depth of 3ft and has been neglected for years. Usually its a duckweed mess and nothing has been done with it. This year I treated it and dyed it just to keep it looking nice, but he decided to add 40 lbs of tilapia to keep the algea at bay. I was thinking the only fish in there are tilapia so with them spawning it should created a lot of bait. Would adding some minnow traps and dumping them every so often into the main pond make a difference?

He is also adding about 120lbs of tilapia into the main lake but figured every bit would help.

Hi, Dave. This may work, but your friend needs to keep in mind that tilapia don't eat most pond weeds. They love algae, so if that's an issue they will help -- they do at my place. Weed control is more a job for grass carp.

By the way, if there is little algae, the tilapia will eat smaller fish. That's not their first choice, but better than starving. That's part of the reason my FHM got devoured before I stocked my LMB, with bad consequences!

At 30 lbs per acre he won't need to supplement stock TP.

Tilapia will eat the duckweed. Adding more small Tilapia to the bigger pond sure won't hurt. We won't be stocking Tilapia until the end of the month, while the surface water temp is warm enough now to stock them (77°F today), the water temp at 5' water depth was only 62°F.

How's the pond behind the house looking?