True or false?

We've all heard it said that birds can stock an otherwise unstocked body of water by dropping/carrying fish eggs. Any conclusive evidence of this other than "well my uncle dug a tank and never stocked it but it's got fish in it?"

One of my teachers told me in highschool that is true. Biology teacher.

Yes, its true. Take the kingfisher. This bird has a habit of catching a fish in one pond then flying over another pond and dropping it in. Do this a few times with something like a green sunfish or bullhead catfish and the stocked pond soon has many fish in it. Then the kingfisher nests, has babies, and they move to the area by the newly stocked pond. By this means the kingfisher expands its range, especially in wetter years by stocking ponds to insure a greater food supply.

OTOH, especially in places like where I work and live along the coast, fish move about fairly easily over very long distances during periods of heavy rainfall. I have seen many thousands of small fish in less than a half inch of water in a grassy field. When it rains a lot and the ditches run, and the fields are flooded, all the water bodies are connected and fish can move in and out easily.

Fish are very good at moving into and filling any aquatic habitat with a void. It is very difficult to find any body of water that has had constant water in it for a year that has no fish. Hence the need to stock ponds soon after they have filled in order to fill the void with desirable, rather than invasive or less desirable species.

I have personally seen it, in bodies of water that were definitely never stocked. Example: There was a drainage ditch for irrigation on one of the farms. It was about 200 yards long, 10 feet wide, and maybe 3 feet deep at the deepest point. It was not connected into any other body of water, even during flooding. It usually went dry every year as well. We had a period of time where it stayed wet for two years, but started to dry up during the 3rd year. It slowly dried up to a very small area, and you could see all the fish swimming. I took the cast net down there to get as many as I could fill my freezer with, and was surprised to find 2 gar, thousands of fingerling catfish, 3 adult catfish, 2 carp, and more shad then I could transport. Oh, and one crappie. No bluegill or bass.

God will find a way!

Hey Brett, what about the myth that shore birds like Herons transport fertilized eggs from pond-to-pond on their legs, and that's how the ponds get fish in them?. I have never believed that one. Never knew about the Kingfisher stocking, either. That's too cool. But I was well aware that most get "stocked" during periods of heavy rainfall and flooding.

We have a dry creekbed at the ranch close to Abilene. We had good rains last year and the water table seeped up in a few places, nothing bigger than sheet of plywood. Last August I was walking the creekbed looking for arrowheads and came upon on of these seeps. It was full of tiny fish. There no ponds upstream that they could have come from.

This is a bit off-topic, but ponds (tanks) can get stocked by fishermen seining up bait minnows from a creek, and then dumping the unused fish. Carp get into a lot of ponds this way

I don't believe it. As far as minnows showing up in a dry creek, the aquafers are alive with small minnows and when springs run the minnows do too.

I read an article on this several years ago. It said that small fish will embed themselves in and under the feathers of birds that swim or stand in that water. The birds would move to another body of water and then those small fish would end up released after the bird lands. What was the name of show.....oh yes.......Believe it or not!!!

Very true.
Charles Darwin proved that many years ago.
We have a pond that we built. Never stocked. No creek that feeds it. Has fish. Explain how that could be anything other than birds.

I do believe Bill Dance or someone of that magnitude said something about it one of their shows as well. If you have water and birds, and fish show up, It only makes sense. I'm a believer!!

I do believe it my pond had no fish in it then a few years later I went out there and caught some!

I believe it.

Fish are very good migrators.

Birds is only one way they can spread. There are many others.

Yes, something like a shad, carp, buffalo fish, etc. that is an "egg spreader" with "sticky" eggs (eggs that cling to whatever substrate they touch and as opposed to non-sticky eggs that tumble down the river) can lay these eggs onto the feet of birds, all over turtles, snakes, alligators, nutria, beaver, anything that moves from land to water and back, where they can easily be transported fairly long distances, to hatch in new waters where the animal may have them fall off, or actually while the animal is just in the water. Fish eggs can stand to be out of water a fairly long time in many cases.

And if a lake or pond has anything short of a spillway with at least a six foot vertical drop, all manner of fish can swim into the lake just by jumping over the spillway when water is flowing over it. A 45 degree angle drop don't get it, even small fish can swim up that when water is flowing over, even if only a half inch deep. 6' Vertical drop. even than some carp might clear it during high flows.

The Chinese have a myth wherein the carp approaches the waterfall and as it jumps over the waterfall, it turns into dragon and flies away. That is how good they can jump, folks think they are flying dragons.

Some fish eggs can sit in a dry river bed for as long as 50 years, then hatch when it rains enough to fill the riverbed long enough for the fish, to hatch, grow, reproduce, and die after laying more long lived eggs.

Nature abhors a vacuum and you will seldom come upon any pond that has had water in it for very long at all that has no fish.

Minners in underground aquafers? You believe that, but not the bird part?

Yeah, because I have seen it. Never saw a bird carry a bucket of bass and stock a pond.

Also no one mentioned the fact that is has been proven that storms / tornadoes, etc, can suck up water, fish, eggs, etc, etc, and literally transport them for miles...and drop them in another body of water.

I grew up in Michigan and one rainy spring we had a lot of water standing for a month or so. I found a few deeper mud puddles with bluegill minnows 1/2 inch long or so. No way other than birds that those minnows ended up in a mud puddle lol.

One bass at a time, a kingfisher can stock many, many ponds.

Yep, there are fish in underground aquifers as well.

And fish eggs that can lay dry for decodes, then hatch when the rain comes.

Much faster to stock it.

Quite interesting facts. Make me wanted to make a pond on my backyard and document it. Nature's got its way of cycle life.

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I've never seen it, but always heard about raining minnows and frogs. From what I've seen here and in life itself, if you've got a pond, its hard to keep fish out of it.

I've seen it rain fish from the sky twice. Weird, but easily explainable in both cases.

The first time it was threadfin shad raining out of the sky by the thousands, from many hundreds of feet up, they looked like silver dollars falling from heaven.....

I drove up onto a large pond (40 or 50 acres) we were raising shad in. It was covered up in pelicans, big white ones. when I drove up they were startled and took off, laboriously running across the surface of the lake and trying to get airborne. When the flock of about 200 birds got to around 150 or 200 feet up they all began to upchuck their full bellies of shad. I learned later that as the air thins, they must work harder to remain in it and will pitch up a big meal in order to lose weight to gain altitude.

They began to just pour the fish out of their mouths like shovels full of silver dollars shining in the sun as they fell to earth.

The second time it was at the big catfish farm. The fish in a 20 acre pond were sick and "riding high" near the top of the pond. The water had cleared and the fish were easily visible from above. The pelicans landed and feasted on the slow, sick catfish. when I drove up they startled and did the same difficult take off to the air. But this time, as they strove to gain altitude, I saw something hit the water by me like it was a cannon ball. Then another hit the levee...WHAM!!

These were one and half and two pounders, not some small light shad, and they were hitting all around me. I got in the truck, and it got hit twice, huge dents, and watched it rain catfish as the flock of 300 or so pelicans rose into the sky. That one was scary.

When I was about 8 yo we lived in Wichita Falls. It came a sorm and we went to my Grandparents to the cellar. After the storm passed we came out and there were little perch/sunfish, whatever you want to cal them, all over the yard flipping around.

This spreading of eggs is also a way nature keeps the DNA fresh

He's right about the minners in the aquifers. It is believed by many scientist that Texas has one of the biggest underground flowing water supplies in the world. There's no telling what creatures can be found just a few feet underground in the abundant karst formations that are common across much of Texas.

I do believe birds and other creatures can and do distribute fish. A well known Zebra mussel study definitively proved that their veligers can survive trips across dry land in the down and feathers of ducks. They also concluded that they were never transported to other lakes in enough numbers to establish a viable breeding population. This is the study that all government entities base their policies on. Go figure,