Hybrid Gills

[Bill "Musky" Modica]

Earlier this year on the way home from a fishing event, one of my partners invited me and a friend to observe a private pond near his home in Southeastern Wisconsin.....I was informed that this pond had been stocked with hybrid gills...Never having caught a specifically stocked hybrid gill, I was stoked at the thought...............After a short ride in a golf cart, we arrived to see a very nicely landscaped perimeter and a beautiful 2 acre pond. The water had been obviously treated with aquashade and had a blue hue.....Still having 1/4 oz... deep water spoons tied on, we threw frantically into the deep blue....the very first cast brought no takers, but more than a dozen very large specimens pursued the spoon similar to several football players running up field in a flying wedge.

We eventually scaled down to 1/16th oz spoons and brought a few in for inspection....these fish were big, had length 10-11"+....but were thin shouldered. The pond also contained a healthy Largemouth population....These fish were pellet fed when we were there, and the water boiled.....due to the absence of body mass, I would guess they were also under-fed.

The landowner was not present when we were there, so I had a lot of unanswered questions about this pond.......The video footage that I captured that day was accidental.....I had the camera strapped around my neck and never knew it was on.

[Bruce Condello]

Thank you for the great blog, Musky Mod.

I'm just speculating, but I believe the low relative weights of the hybrids had to do with the aquashade.

Aquashade makes for pretty water, but it also pulls the rug out from under the food web. Poor phytoplankton production means lower capacity for zooplankton production. This means that there's very little in the way of invertebrates for lepomids like BG X GS to consume. If you couple that with the fact that the hybrids themselves are probably not producing many young to cannibalize, then you have a situation where you need to provide artificial feed on a regular basis to prop up the hybrids' body condition.

I've never seen ultra-clear water in combinations with high Wr sunfish unless there was either a very low population density of sunnies, or there was a high intensity feeding program.

[richard adkins]

Right on! Colored water is good for swimming pools or Kool-Aid but not for growing healthy fish. A pond without some algae or grass is probably infertile.

[10.5" RES Sharon]

Would you then say Bruce that cloudy water like mine is better for BG, both for hiding and for the above things to eat? I hope so, because it seems to be cloudy 365 days a year.