how do you get a grass carp for your pond and what do you have to do/have to keep one?

B.payne,

The first thing you have to do is apply for a permit from T,P,&W and pay a fee for same. They are pretty good at processing requests and you should have a permit in three or four weeks, assuming you answer the questions satisfactorily. The main concern from T,P,&W is to make sure you won't release the carp into public waters, inadvertantly or otherwise.

You need to decide how many carp you want for your pond. Generally they will permit you for up to 10 to 15 carp per acre, but most likely you don't need or want that many. My personal management approach is to stock 1 to 2 grass carp per acre as a preventive/maintenance measure. However, severe weed infestations may require much higher rates. It is much better to prevent a weed problem than it is to try to recover from one.

Excess grass carp are a problem in some ponds. They grow to large sizes, can strip your vegetation completely and even muddy the water. They are somewhat difficult to catch, very shy.

They can be very selective feeders...for example, they do not prefer algae and will not control it.

I've had a lot of experience with them in ponds and have documented those experiences at this link:

http://www.meadowlarkponds.com/grasscarp.htm

Maybe that's more than you wanted to hear about grass carp, sorry if I rambled too much. When properly stocked, they are a good pond management tool.

thats great thanks!

For severe infestations, I usually stock 6 or 7 per acre. The first year, you will see very little results. Like Meadowlark says, there are some things they won't eat. They are very succeptible to low dissolved oxygen in the water and are the first to die. If you ever catch one, it's like roping a freight train. They grow to 3 or 4 ft. long but when they get older, they don't eat much.

They generally cost $15.00 each and are sold at 10 to 12 inches long. You can expect to have to build a fish barrier and send the pictures to TPWD for their files. Picture of acceptable barriers can be found on the TPWD website.

They are a good tool IF you are targeting the vegetation that they will control.

They aren't always the first to die in a pond....depending on what you have in the pond. Last summer in August I had a complete die-off of the hybrid striped bass in one pond. The grass carp and other fish did just fine. Low O2/high temps was the cause. HSB in my ponds are very intolerant.

Also, I recently got my third permit from T,P,&W for grass carp(the permits expire after 5 years). They did not require any pictures, but did call me on the phone to discuss my plans and barriers for the carp.

ok well i learned that grass carp don't eat algee and that is a big problem in the pond i was thinking about putting them in so maybe i shouldn't get any. whats a good way to remove filamentous algae and planktonic algae?

Tilapia are normally a terror on filamentous algae. Stocked at 10 pounds per acre, they make pood scum a distant bad memory for most folks. Plus they reproduce abundant perfect sized forage for bass, not to mention their eating qualities. In effect, by stocking Tilapia in a bass pond, you are converting a bad negative (filamentous algae) to a huge positive by generating bass feed out of algae.

Read about them at this link:

http://srac.tamu.edu/index.cfm?catid=11

Also, my experiences with them in my ponds are documented on my web site Just select "fish" and then "Tilapia".

i read that tilapia die if the water temp drops below than 50-52 degress for several days will that be a problem in east texas?

Larry, that's interesting. I've always found, in North Texas, that Amur are like the proverbial canary in the coal mine. My condolences about the HSB. I'm curious about our differences.

I'm dealing with a different TPWD guy in North Texas. He always requires pictures but that's no problem. Since I usually stock for other people, I have to get a new permit each time.

Pay attention to anything that Meadowlark says about tilapia. He was maybe the first guy in Texas to experiment with them.

Blake,

Yes, they begin dieing at water temps of 55 degrees and are all dead at 50 degrees water temp. I have a few large dead ones this morning in my East Texas ponds. It isn't a problem as Nature's clean-up crew will have them removed in a few hours.

If you stock Tilapia in a bass pond, you will generally only see a few large ones at die-off. The small and medium ones will all be eaten by your fish just before they die as they kind of go into a stupor and are very vulnerable to bass predation just before dieing.

If you don't have a predator, such as LMB, in the pond, then you will see hundreds of all sized Tilapia die about this time of year depending on the temps. When you have a large die-off all at once, it takes Nature's clean-up crew a couple of days to get the job done, but it isn't a problem and no smell or mess to worry about. Now if the pond was in your front yard, it might be a different story.

In East Texas, where I'm located, Tilapia generally live to about the first of Jan. and a little later like this year. It may sound like a problem to have to re-stock every year and for some people that may be the case. For me, I wouldn't have a fishing pond without them. If you figure at 10 pounds per acre and $10 per pound, for a 1 acre pond that is $100 a year for complete algae control, pond clean-up, tons of small forage for your predator fish, and, if you like, several meals of blackened Tilapia. (:-

In all my years of messing with ponds, I haven't found any other way possible to come even close to that $100 per year number, not even close. I've got about 10 acres of water contained in 5 ponds and believe me, management costs and my time are both very important to me. I much prefer fishing my ponds to treating them, raking them, etc., etc. Chemicals alone will cost more than that $100 and who wants chemicals in your fish pond? I don't.

Forage for LMB generally runs $10 per pound and each LMB requires 10 pounds of forage to gain just one pound. In forage alone, Tilapia pay for themselves hundreds of times over.

Not even close, no even close.

Dave,

No condolences necessary, my friend, because I wanted to get rid of them anyway. Our differences may be regional, perhaps. HSB do not live up to the big sales hype in my region, not even close.

Do you actually have HSB in your ponds? In my area, they fall far short of the sellers advertised qualities. They are the most heat/O2 sensitive fish I've had in my ponds(other than winter stocked rainbow trout). Catch them in summer and they die and some die even without even being caught.

The guy that sold me the HSB said they would grow to 8 to 10 pounds in three years and had no problems in small ponds. Six years later, they didn't even come close to 10 pounds, but LMB in the same pond reached 10 pounds and are still growing.

Now several years later, I read a post on a forum in which he said that HSB were 8 times more sensitive to O2 problems than BG, 8 times. Interesting.

And what about that 8 to 10 pounds in three years? I can't find one person, not one in Texas who has had any such experience. If anyone made such a claim in Texas, I would have to see it myself to believe the HSB actually was raised in a small pond. In my ponds, when they get to about 4 or 5 pounds, after about 4 years, they die. Where are all those 8 to 10 pound three year old fish in Texas ponds? Regional differences?

If you have raised them to 8 to 10 pounds in three years in an East Texas pond, I'd sure like to know how you do it. If you can catch HSB in summer in the same ponds without having them die, I would also love to hear how that is done...and please don't tell me to buy a resucitation tank and O2 bottles and chemicals. Not interested.

But we digress from the topic of this thread, which is helping Blake with his algae problem. Grass carp won't help much at all with algae, but they are great on pond weed and other vegetation. Grass carp shouldn't be handled/stocked in late summer, but they do just fine in my ponds all year long unlike HSB, and they can easily reach 15 to 20 pounds, also unlike HSB.

How are they on eurasian watermilfoil? If you feed pellets to your gamefish, will the carp start eating the pellets instead of their veggies?

Roadtrip,

Good questions. On the first one, unfortunately, grass carp (GC) are not very good at controlling eurasian watermilfoil. You have to have total lack of any other vegetation in the pond and then sometimes, sometimes they eat the watermilfoil. I haven't had any of that stuff, fortunately, but here is what a government web site says:

"Although triploid grass carp will eat Eurasian watermilfoil, it is not a highly palatable or preferred species. To achieve control of Eurasian watermilfoil generally means the total removal of more palatable native aquatic species before the grass carp will consume Eurasian watermilfoil. In situations where Eurasian watermilfoil is the only aquatic plant species in the lake, this may be acceptable. However, generally grass carp are not recommended for Eurasian watermilfoil control."

On the second question, yes, after a period of time, they will be the first pigs at the trough of the fish pellets. Yes, it definitely reduces their effectiveness in controling vegetation, not to mention what feeding pellets does to add to a vegetation problem by introducing more nutrients into the water. When my grass carp get to be about three years old and reach a weight of over 10 pounds, they line up almost exclusively at the fish feeders.

By the way, grass carp have a short gut digestive system that is only about 70% effective in processing food. This means that a grass carp eating fish pellets is passing on most of that as waste in your water. Can't be a good thing for water quality.

Because of this, I try to "rotate" them out and replace with younger GC after three years. I have no use for grass carp that eat fish pellets rather than unwanted vegetation, so out they go, in my ponds.

If you have too many grass carp you can always get someone from the carp board to come fish your pond for ya. If you are in Smith, Gregg, Harrison, Cherokee County...etc...holler at me. :-)