Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Saugeye vs Walleye - Locating, Uses

I'm not sure saugeye are any better than walleye (WE). Saugeye are a cross between the sauger and walleye. I do not recall reading any scientific literature that compares WE and saugeye survival advantages in various 'poorer' water quality situations. Saugeye are promoted and 'bragged up' by some states, but I have not seen significant benefits of them compared to WE. I have saugeye in my perch dominated pond. Another 1 ac pond near me has both WE and saugeye; but stocked at different numbers, although both fish species are growing at basically the same rate, utilizing the ample forage of YP (yellow perch) & 4 species of minnow/shiner.
Saugeye are basically only produced by state DNR's with 'healthy' budgets. Walleye and saugeye are pretty tolerent of a wide variety of water conditions. Resident WE populations live in our local muddy, warm (to 90F), Maumee River in NW Ohio. Sauger and WE live together in the often muddy upper Ohio Rv. WE live in numerous midwest US murky or silt laden reservors that drain predominately agricultural watersheds. If Ewest sees this, he may be able to do a literature search to see if saugeye tolerate lower DO and poorer water quality compared WE, which would be a benefit of Saugeye. As I mentioned I do not recall ever seeing any scientific proof of this.

Do you have strong reasons using saugeye instead of walleye? My experience is, given the same numbers in a BOW, WE are a little easier to catch than saugeye. I will call my WE/saugeye contact and get some specific numbers of angler catch ratios of WE vs saugeye (same age, but different stocking numbers) in the same pond (see post below for this info). If you search digilently and ask all the WE growers you contact, you might get lucky and locate a private fish hatchery that is going to try and produce them this spring. Not sure why a private grower would produce them because it requires two separate brood stock species that are ripe at the same time, often extra travel, and sometimes lower hybrid fingerling survival. This takes quite a bit more effort than producing pure WE and probably not any more profitable than selling WE fingerlings for a private producer. About only ones that can 'afford' all that extra time and effort are states with the taxpayer and license fees as source money.

Welder- May I suggest that you go back into your original post and change the title to Saugeye Searching or Locating Saugeye to help those members searching for subjects, topics and titles. I can do this for you, but I did not want to modify your post without permission.