Thread: heres my question..

It depends. I prefer not to have crappie in my ponds. but I have 2 stocked with bass, perch, channel and grass carp. My other pond has nothing stocked in it but channel. However, eggs can be migrated from one pond or stream to others by several different methods the most common being by birds.

When I pond fish I'm always looking for crappie, but seem to find bass alot more then I find crappie

Welcome to the promised land Youngblood where you might want to keep your Texas beginnings on the down low! LOL. My pond has everything Papa's has and then add black crappie and two big blue catfish, that we catch and release more often than we expected to. I think it is possible that in a few years we may be down to only the two blues and some massive grass carp and several big Koi that I forgot to mention.

Okay now I got a better understanding of what some people are stocking there ponds with. Thanks guys.

Originally Posted by Concrete_fisherman7

When I pond fish I'm always looking for crappie, but seem to find bass alot more then I find crappie

I may be way off base here but the reason I don't stock crappie is because they have a tendency to overpopulate in a hurry and for the most part all you end up with are a bunch of dinks that consume all the forage fish. I do occasionally remove a few from the ponds when getting perch to catfish with. Being as my ponds get all their water off the fields, I can only assume that they have been brought in by other means.

Yeah I heard crappie tend to over populate pretty rapidly and that can cause alot of issues with the size of the crappies. I would think if you throw in a lot of bass I'm pretty sure they can decrease the numbers of over population but you would also have to help the bass out cause they surely won't be able to do it on there own.

I have an idea. What if your having an over population problem and you throw in some Gar I know they'll help a great deal of lowering crappie population. I know in Texas we used to do that to lower are perch population because we didn't have any bass in it. It was a perch and crappie pond only and all we caught was perch and little crappie so I had that idea and threw in three gar I caught catfishin idk but a year after that we actually started catching more crappie but every now and then we caught one or two that were scared up but it didn't like any of the gar had messed with em. I'm jus throw in that out there and see if anyone wanted to throw in there input on that.

Them gar are scud runners. I manage my ponds by selective harvest. I select a certain amount of perch I'm going to take cat fishing and some bass go in the freezer every year. Hey it ain't crappie, but the in laws like it! LOL