Many years ago I tossed a few adult crappie in a 1 acre pond and was able to recatch the adults over the next couple of years, but nothing afterwards. Do they need a lot of acreage to become sustainable? Also, my neighbor has a 2.5 acre pond and for the last 15 years I have occasionally caught white bass in it. I thought they required a lot of open water to be sustainable, but I don't know if people are introducing them when they clean fish at the nearby boat storage or what.

As of last year, Chain Pickerel had put a huge hurt on the BG population at Daingerfield State Park (per the state employee). Lots of skinny fish in there, guess the Chains have had some good spawns.

I'd guess if a pond was deep enough some of these toothy critters could survive a summer. I know Walleye can make it thru a summer, I think Squaw Creek has them.

Here in TX, the vast majority of managed ponds have all blue cats, yellow cats, Pickerel, crappie, carp, gar removed during surveys.

In a brand spanking new managed pond for large bass, many choose to stock just coppernose, redear, and fatheads the first year to establish a forage base, and then introduce bass fingerlings the following Spring.

There are obviously different methods to go about this but that is my real world experience.

I personally would rather harvest the smaller adult fish rather than introducing larger predators (Muskie, Catfish, Gar) that get big enough to eat 1lb Bg's and 5+lb bass that are being raised with lots of money (spent on food and management).

Pixel, the reason crappie are generally not recommended for ponds or even lakes under 100 acres is that they are prone to severe overpopulation, even more so than bluegill. It doesn't always happen right away; sometimes it might take four or five years; but at some point they have a huge spawn, and the pond is filled with thousands or tens of thousands of 6" crappie so thin you can practically see through them.

I would never recommend muskie as a blanket approach for every pond. I only mentioned them as an example of someone in the pond world advising other pond owners against a management method that the would-be expert has never had experience with himself, and how such advice purely based on theory, rather than actual first-hand observation and experience, is often worth what was paid for it. I had made the comment that bluegill, once they overpopulate, can eliminate bass reproduction, which is something widely observed and documented among fisheries biologists, and which is also something I have seen the results of many times firsthand, by coming across ponds that had had largemouth in the past, but had had them entirely eliminated by overpopulated bluegill. It was questioned whether this can actually happen, so I gave the example of the muskie as an illustration of theory versus hard evidence.

Both of my best trophy bluegill ponds now, were in exactly this bass-less condition when I began working with them. There were no bass left in either pond, and the bluegill were so badly overpopulated that they averaged 3" in one pond, and 2" in the other (I took pictures but have lost them - every bluegill I photographed was shorter than the pencil float I laid by it for reference). The bluegill in the pond where they averaged 2" were the most morbidly stunted bluegill I have ever seen: their eyes were the biggest feature on their bodies.

The lesser of those two ponds has produced at least one northern-strain (as in doesn't get as big as coppernose) bluegill over 10" every time I have fished it this year, with the largest being right at 11"; the better pond of the two has produced a coppernose that was estimated at one-and-three-quarter pounds by a bluegill expert who recently had an article published on hybrid bluegill, and a northern-strain bluegill that was estimated at over two pounds by a man who has had several articles on bluegill published. Both of those ponds are an acre or less, and yet they have better bluegill fishing than most anglers have ever experienced. And they both have muskie. So perhaps this is one of those cases of theory being trumped by observation and practice.

Oh wow, I didn't know they were that prolific. Thanks for the information.