Pond Boss Forums AQUATIC VEGETATION Balance of plants in the environment Pondweed, chara, vs duckweed

pdubdo,

I would very much prefer chara over duckweed. The trophic stage of your pond might not support duckweed at this time.

Chara love limey soils and commonly occurs where I grew up in Oklahoma where there is limestone outcrops locally. Chara is an interesting macro algae that is symbiotic with periphytonic blue-green algae that fixes nitrogen. It is actually very important to maintaining the fertility of some rice paddies that have been in production more than 2000 years. It is also a very good plant to have if you want to establish PK shrimp providing both food (periphyton) and cover for them.

If I had this problem, I would probably consider ways of intercepting nutrients as esshup suggested, I would stop feeding if you happen to be doing that, I would introduce PK shrimp, and finally I might build a 1/20 acre forage pond to raise crayfish. I would seine the forage pond once a year and put them all in the main pond as forage that would shred and consume the Chara. They are great forage. It would work like this ... they would have cover and grow when there is plenty of chara ... as they deplete the chara they will be exposed to predators (so will the PK shrimp). Treat it as an annual cycle of growth and consumption.

Harvesting fish is a great way of removing nutrients but it can be kind of slow if its LMB and BG that your are harvesting. You might reasonable remove around 60 to 75 lbs/acre maintaining balance but the dry weight of those fish are only 12 to 15 lbs/acre. So its easy to see that if one harvests like that while feeding 50 lbs of formulated feed a month for 5 months a year that he is adding nutrient dry weight up to 20 times faster than he is taking it out.