Too many species?

[mashtom]

I fish a pond that is spring fed and was wondering if there can be a detrimental effect from having too many species. The pond has bluegill, large and smallmouth bass, catfish, redhorse sucker, perch, crappie, brown and rainbow trout. I am sure there are a few other smaller species to such as minnows and what not. You can catch the gills all day long and the trout are reliable (bows more than browns), everything else is pretty tight lipped. It is maybe 1/2 acre pond and one of my favorite places to fish. I am glad to have all of them in one place but was just curious.

[pdowney]

In general, a lot of species indicates good water quality and diverse habitat. Good things.

[Wild One]

I can't answer your question, but I would pay good money to live close to a pond like that!

[DG]

In a small closed system like that, it isn't the # of species that limits things, it is the size of the pond, although there is undoubtedly some competition for habitat and food between those species. You can have many different types of organisms in there (and what is actually there in terms of life would boggle your mind, I suspect). But the #s of the top predators, bass, large trout, etc, are going to be limited by the amount of forage they have, and that amount of forage is limited by what THEY can eat, and so on. In VERY rough ballpark figures, it takes ten pounds of baitfish to support one pound of bass, and ten pounds of bugs to support one pound of bluegill, etc. So the system can only support so many pounds of fish. If you have LOTS of fish, they can't be very big, and if you have BIG fish, there can't be that many of them. I

Now if the system isn't closed, you can support more fish than that. Throwing handfuls of Purina Trout Chow into a pond vastly increases the # of trout that can live there. Also, a stream running into it would constantly add nutrients to the system (then again, the water flowing out would remove them).

Sounds like you have a pretty good pond there.