female hybrid

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Comment by Zach Pierce on April 18, 2012 at 3:23pm

Walt,

What was the ratio of pounds of tilapia to acre of water?  What type and size of tilapia were stocked.  Do you think that the GSF and HBG would eat some of the tilapia fry?

Comment by Walt Foreman on March 3, 2012 at 10:52am

Zach, just going off what you've posted in the past about your pond, i.e. fish pictures and your descriptions of its dynamics, I would recommend you add at least thirty largemouth 6" or larger, and more would be better.  But thirty would make a big positive difference.  The larger the bass you stock, the more immediate of a difference they'll make - 6" bass are only going to be able to eat fingerling bluegill, whereas one-pound largemouth will be able to eat a good percentage of the bluegill and GSF in your pond at the moment.  Dunn's sells both 6-8" and pound-size bass, but you should definitely check with them ahead of time because normally the traveling trucks will only carry fingerlings unless a customer has called ahead and requested larger fish. 

 

One other thing to keep in mind: stocking tilapia will have a drastic negative impact on your bluegill.  I've seen it firsthand several times.  Anytime a supplemental forage species is stocked, it's going to take some of the bass predation pressure off the bluegill, which then allows many more of the YOY bluegill to survive.  More than once I've seen a pond go from having a balanced bluegill population to being badly overpopulated with 2-3" bluegill, just within a couple months of tilapia being stocked.  One pond near my hometown has had tilapia stocked in it twice, two years apart; the year tilapia weren't stocked, the bluegill fishing was good and we never caught a preponderance of very small fish; but both years tilapia were stocked, within a couple months of the stocking the pond would be overrun with runt bluegill.  The boom in small bluegill is due to the bass suddenly having thousands upon thousands of tilapia young to prey on, and not eating as many bluegill YOY.  The same thing happens when golden shiners are stocked as a supplemental forage. 

Comment by Tony Livingston on March 2, 2012 at 1:30pm

 While I try not to delve too deeply into pond management here at BBG, Walt is quite correct in that the fish in my HBG pond have the odds stacked in their favor. I don't recall ever seeing a HBG over 2lbs, but Bruce has shown us that coppernose and native BG can grow much larger than that.

To reinforce what Walt said, I also caught 4 Largemouth Bass last night, between 8 and 12" long. Very Bass heavy in this particular pond.

Comment by Zach Pierce on March 2, 2012 at 12:17pm

 

Maybe I will go ahead and try to move some more, larger bass again this spring before it gets hot if I can find some to move.  How many more do you think I need.  Or should I say how many in total should I stock so I can go back to see how many I have already put in and add to those.

I think Dunn’s is coming back into to in a few weeks maybe they have some larger bass.  They say that is what they are known for is their LMB.  Plus I hope this year I will be able to catch some of my BG to see for sure if they are coppernose or northern strain, since it is so hard to tell them apart when they are 1-3 inches.

I have not had much time to make it out to try the pond for a few months as I am remodeling a house we just bought but hope to get out soon and get some new pics.  Will be neat to see which fish are larger this year, the GSF, BG, CNBG, HBG since I believe I could have all of these in my pond.

Comment by Walt Foreman on March 2, 2012 at 12:00pm

Keep in mind, Zach, that Tony has very intentionally created ideal conditions for those bluegill in his pond - he has a very high density of bass, which is just as important as feeding a high-protein food, which he also does.  From your posts it sounds like you are definitely still way short of having enough bass in your pond.  I know that you said you're expecting to see YOY bass show up, but as long as you have too many small bluegill, especially small green sunfish, those fry bass are going to all get eaten.  You need to stock some intermediate, 6-8", or ideally adult, pound-class largemouth; if you do so, your coppernose will eventually outgrow hybrids.   Witness the two three-pound bluegill Bruce caught from Richmond Mill last May - both of those fish were coppernose.  And, more recently, he caught a three-pound northern-strain bluegill from that anonymous pond. 

 

The moral is, if you create ideal conditions in your pond, pure-strain bluegill will get huge.

Comment by chris on March 2, 2012 at 9:29am

Nice gill.

Cant wait for them to start hitting here.

the weather is wishy washy right now, 3 days warm 2 days cold. light rain lots

of wind. it keeping the fish down and not bitting.

Comment by Tony Livingston on March 2, 2012 at 8:01am

They're nothing special Zach, they came from a local hatchery.

Comment by Zach Pierce on March 2, 2012 at 7:53am

Sure makes me wish I would have just went with the HBG in my pond now, since they do grow faster, and this was for the kids anyway.

 

We will just have to see how mine end up.

 

Where did you get your fish anyway?

Comment by Tony Livingston on March 2, 2012 at 5:21am

She was huge, but since I left the scale at home I can't verify her weight. I didn't intend to fish hard, I just grabbed a rod with a jig on it, no tackle box, and headed down. I have a camera in my truck, thank goodness.

My goal when I started with the hybrids was to get a fish to 1.5lbs. She had to be close, if not there already. All I can think about now, is what will she weigh when she's gravid?

Comment by Walt Foreman on March 1, 2012 at 9:41pm

Awesome fish, Tony!

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