Good evening pond boss community,
I have about a 1/2 acre pond 12-14 ft deep in North Central Iowa. Over the last 3 weeks or so every day I've gone out to the pond I've found another 1 to 5inch fish dead along the shore. I walk the pond every morning around dawn and then 3-4 more time periodically throughout the day and I see 1 or 2 fish dying every day, I haven't seen more than 2, and have only had a day or 2 where I haven't seen any floating. They have all been green sunfish < 5 inches in length until today and then I did find a 3-4 inch perch dead along the shore. I haven't seen anything larger than that and haven't had any catfish, walleye, crappie or large GSF during this same 3 week ish timeframe.
I purchased the property back in march, the pond had about 5 big grass carp, and countless Channel Cats and GSF. Nothing else. So we pulled around 50 catfish out and I stocked 100 3inch perch, 100 crappie 2inch, 25 walleye 5-6inch and a gallon of fatheads back in May. Then added another gallon of fatheads, 70 1.5 inch SMB and 100 1.5inch Redear sunfish in June.
I run the 3 aerators at night typically so I don't superheat the pond and we were feeding about 1 cup of sportsman every evening.
Everything was fine up until the beginning of August when the GSF started dying. It's been a weird year, we had so much rain in the spring that the water actually rolled over the berm by about 4 inches and now we've basically been in a drought < 1 inch of rain since june and the pond has lost 12-18 inches of depth. So I ran the well and added a couple inches of water back into it thinking maybe that would help with the die off and I've been running my 3 aerators 24/7 after the first week of the die off, but nothing has changed, I still go out every day and see 1 or 2 dead. Today was the first perch I've seen so I decided it was time to ask if anyone else had run into this or if there is something else I should be trying? We stopped feeding them about a week ago as well.
I'm kind of at a loss as to whether or not I should be concerned, if perhaps this is just a random stress event perhaps or if it's something I'm doing? Is it just that time of year when the weather is weird and the fish are stressed to the max and I just need to kind of wait until it cools off more in September and revisit the situation?
Everything I've found on this forum/searching google seem to indicate if it was D.O. levels that we would see a pretty dramatic event, 10s of fish dead at a time, not this weird slow die off.
Let me know what y'all think.
Best
~K
