Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations A new pond journal.. lets see where we go!

tylerd1994 - Not a lot of research has been published on HSB for controlling BCP but there has been a few articles about this. Basically young new born crappie move to open water for several months to live and feed away from shoreline. This open water is where HSB spend most of their life. Thus the two species intermingle a lot when crappie are small. Research studies concluded that HSB when adequately abundant can eat a lot of small young of year(YOY) crappie and reduce or control recruitment of crappie.

BE aware during years with heavy crappie spawns a pond could get a reduced overpopulation of small crappie when HSB is not enough, and the owner would have to manually harvest 4"-6" crappie to put the crappie population back toward resembling some sort of acceptable balance. A pond with crappie would IMO require a closer fish monitoring of fish numbers compared to other common combinations of fishes. Bottom line - crappie are risky but doable in smaller ponds. Remember crappie are basically just smaller predators and to grow well they need lots of food that would have been eaten by other pond fish. Each crappie detracts from another fish in the pond - competition. The 'weakest' one usually suffers or both do not grow to the their potential.

The more fish species and numbers that are in a pond the more difficult it becomes to keep all species growing at their best rate because each species tends to feed in its own unique food niche that often can detract from the food feeding niche of another species - competition. Both species might suffer rather than both being enhanced.