I was told once (by some guy giving a pond management seminar) that crappie will not reproduce in a tank under 25 surface acres in size...found that hard to believe...as I understand it, they sell black crappie for pond stockings, but I can't say that a biologist or salesman will agree with me on that subject. As a kid we always stocked our own ponds with fish from the lake...so we could catch them when we couldn't get a ride to the lake...worked real well. Fish seemed to get pretty fat too...Not sure those 3" crappie are gonna make it to adulthood in a tank loaded with cats...me personally, I would probably just catch at the lake and release in the tank...which would be the only way I would catch and release a legal crappie!!!

All my tanks are subject to go dry, so I don't ever stock them.

See if you can get SheCrappieKilla to weigh in on the subject...he knows a thing or two about the subject...Just DONT mention to DW that I said that!!!! LOL

It'll take fingerling crappies about 3 - 5 years to reach 10-12 inches, under ideal conditions; they're a fairly slow growing fish.

I don't know which is more hearty, they're both pretty delicate species.

You might get some reproduction out of a transplant during the spawn cycle but I would think the chances are low. One of the primary reasons private pond managers don't recommend crappie is because their spawns are inconsistent. And, when they do have a successful spawn, the offspring can often be so numerous that the predators can't thin them out fast enough and the entire crappie population becomes stunted.

Both white and black crappie absolutely will spawn in a small pond, often to the detriment of the entire fishery. It then takes overstocking a predator species or draining and re-starting to get the fishery back in order.

Now, you can have successful crappie populations in small ponds, it is just very difficult to maintain and often the "good fishing" is short lived. When an owner is dead-set on it, black crappie are recommended because their spawns are a little more consistent and a little less likely to "boom or bust" than white crappie. Next, overstocking largemouth bass (or if the water hardness is high enough, stocking hybrid striped bass in addition to largemouth bass) has been shown to be effective at maintaining a low enough population of crappie to allow the crappie to reach good eating size. The trade-off here is that you must maintain the high population of largemouth bass (and/or hybrid striped bass if water chemistry allows) through minimal harvest (if any) which leads to a smaller average size of largemouth bass (lots of skinny bass in the 9-12 inch range). My guess is that if catfish are the only predator in the pond, after the adult crappie that you stock in the pond die out, all you will have left are oodles and oodles of 3-5 inch crappie (mostly too small to catch by rod and reel alone) and some very happy catfish.

Another option is hybrid crappie. They tend to grow a little faster than the normal strains because the energy that would go to gonad production (they don't reproduce much, if at all) is put towards muscle growth and you don't have to worry about them overpopulating. The trade-off with hybrids is that they are a put-and-take kind of fishery where the number you put in is pretty much all you're going to have until you put more in to replace natural and fishing mortality.