# Golden shiners in your farm pond, good or bad



## bigsweets008

I recently built a 2.5 acre pond, on a old pond site that the dam busted in the late 60's it is now 3.5 years old.  We poisen'd the pond before stocking, but seems we didn't kill everything.  We have a feeder set up on the dock that feeds once a day, and the fishing has been good until this year.  It seems like we might catch 15-20 bream off the dock in about 1.5 hour where it use to take 30 min.  I have noticed alot of shiners lately, and although i have already caught several bass over 6lbs(thrown them back) the lack of bream catching has me a little concerned, the bream we are catching are huge, but the numbers are way down.  Do you think the increase in shiner population could be hurting the bream pop? what are your thoughts on shiners in a farm pond?


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## speechless33759

I fish a pond just like that and think it's a very healthy pond. It has a large population of good bass, bream, and crappie in it. They all feed on the shiners in that pond so they are very fat. And that's what it sounds like in your pond. Sometimes too much bream isn't a good thing either.


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## Gunny146

Grimes is the man to answer that one, he is the pond management master.


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## OldGuyAl

I'll chime in with my personal experiences in my own pond though anything Greg Grimes tells you should be taken as the much better answer - he is THE MAN! 

We bought our pond and it had a lot of very skinny bass and almost no small bream.   We added 1 million golden shiner fry a couple of years ago (a 4-acre pond) and we now have several classes of bream - little ones and big ones - and our bass all have bellies on them like mine (which is to say they are fat)!   Our shiners are doing quite well and so are all our other fish but, there is one downside to it all - our bass don't bite like they used to.  Several pondmeisters I've talked to about this agree that our bass just aren't as hungry as they used to be.
We still catch bass but not nearly as many as we did when they were starving.   When we bought the pond, we could catch those skinny bass about as fast as we could throw a bait in the water...now, we get skunked every once in a while and other times we'll only catch 2 or 3 in a couple of hours.

OK, I'm still happy that our bass are getting fat, spawning well, and growing like crazy.  I just have to learn to fish better, I guess. 

Some pond management experts told me that we should have gone with fathead minnows instead of golden shiners so, consider that as an option, too.


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## Wes204

Shiners are great.  If you didn't stock them after poisioning, then there's no telling what other species survived the poision application.  Hopefully not green sunfish, giz shad, bullheads.  If you are catching big bass like that, then you're not going to grow trophy class bream.  If you want big bream, you need to have lots of small bass.  If I had to guess, you have a bass heavy pond...which most do, and that's why you are seeing the huge bream.  Also, if this is the case, there should be plenty of LMB's to keep the shiners under control.  THe main thing to establish is what are your goals for the pond.  If it's only 3.5 years old, then you still have that "new lake effect" and fish growth could be pretty impressive is the years to come.


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## diamondback

the one thing I can tell you is that the one thing that all the ponds that I regularly catch good bass out of is that they all have golden shiners.


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## bigsweets008

went fishing with pops yesterday, only fished off the dock, caught 2 bass useing shiners( caught a dozen useing crickets)  on a cork, 2.5lbs and a 6.5lb, caught 1 catfish on a cricket 15.5lbs(stocked 50 cats and "ole charlie" is the only survivor), caught 10 bream all big as my hand within a hour and a half, i'm definitly happy with my bass in the pond, but i just feel that my small bream population is hurting. I'm catching trophy size bream, just not catching any 2 and 3 finger size bream which has me concerned.


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## OldGuyAl

well, I probably didn't really make myself clear that the shiners seem to have taken the pressure off the bream...again, I'm just going by observation - I'm not an expert and I'm a fairly new pond owner.  But we did have hopes that having a good population of shiners would let the bream have a better chance at surviving and growing and that seems to be happening.
Hope that helps.  There's a lot of science to managing a pond but even the experts don't always agree on some stuff but, the one thing I find that all the experts will agree on is just this:  every pond is different.


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## across the river

Shiners are good if you are looking to grow big bass.  The grow large enough to provide good forage for the larger bass.   If you want a "good" bream pond, however, shiners are probably not what you want.  They may have taken some pressure off the bream as a forage fish, but they are competing with the bream for food.  They also eat bream eggs which can hold down the population.  If you are looking to grow big bass, shiners will likely help you out.  If you want a balanced ponds with a lot of eating size bream, you are probably going to have to kill them all and start over.


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## vagrantprodigy

Catch the Shiners, and give them to me  I used to love using them as bait when I was a kid.


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