Flathead Catfish

[jwcarlson]

When we bought this property, someone was keeping some flathead catfish in one of the ponds. Long story short, we ended up "inheriting" them. We tried a few times last summer to catch one, but never were successful. My assumption was that there just weren't any of them in there. Last weekend I got home from an errand and my son came running up and said he found the catfish. I thought he was goofing with me, but sure enough... he had. That day there appeared to be about 10 fairly big flatheads. Some of them as long as my arm, maybe longer? Flatheads kind of school up and just hang out in a pod all winter and do not feed... or at least feed very very little. People will snag them through the ice, which doesn't seem to sporting. In any event. Today they were up sunning themselves again, but it is hard to get a picture of them in the water. This is from my smartphone through my polarized sunglasses and then edited heavily to make the fish more visible. Only 3-4 in this picture, I think.

My goal at some point this spring or summer is to siphon the pond dry, killing all the fish in it, and "resetting"/restocking the pond with bluegills and largemouth bass with the goal of having a decent bluegill fishery. It's got way too much going on in it right now. I'm hoping to be able to catch these when the weather warms up. Or at the very least butcher them when I drain the pond down. Good amount of meat there and flathead is well regarded, though I have never eaten it.

[Second Hand Pat]

Cool picture Jacob, if you left the flatheads in the pond would they compete too much with the bluegill and bass? Asking out of curiosity!
Pat

[jwcarlson]

Cool picture Jacob, if you left the flatheads in the pond would they compete too much with the bluegill and bass? Asking out of curiosity!
Pat

Right now there's SEVERAL species in the pond (flatheads, channel catfish, green sunfish, bluegills, pumpkinseed, golden shiners...), but the pond is quite small (only about 1/4 acre). Flatheads are river fish, not pond fish. I believe the guy who had them in the pond would catch them in the river and then put them in the pond. And eventually sell them later when he trapped them back out of the pond. I have no idea if that's even legal, but he was doing it. Flatheads eat live fish, they are predators unlike channel catfish which are more opportunistic feeders.

The bigger problem with the pond right now is that there are tons of green sunfish in it. Like most sunfish, they will overpopulate and eventually all you have in a ton of really small, stunted fish. They actually look a lot like stunted discus. Huge eyes, skinny, weird proportions. The goal with just bluegills and bass is that the bluegills will overpopulate if they can, but if you have a big enough population of bass they will keep enough pressure on the bluegills that you will have a fairly small population of large bluegills breeding and the predation pressure keeps it that way as there's not much recruitment from spawning. The predator fish (bass) in this circumstance would be the fish that probably ends up fairly stunted probably not getting much above 14".

It's all tradeoffs, I guess. Right now the pond is completely unmanageable.

[jeep]

Flathead are good eating, but you're correct in that they are a river fish. Sunfish are good eating as well but are very prolific. You're also correct about being over populated. A good mix of bluegill, largemouth bass and maybe bullheads would be ideal.

A friend had only bass and some sort of feeder fish in his pond he inherited from his father and it had never been fished. He didn't want me to keep any because they were all small and he wanted them to grow. I told him their size wasn't the issue, over population was. I told him we should keep everything between 9" to 14" and thin the population. Within 2 years we were catching 6 pounders. It was nice having my own private pond to fish in.

[jwcarlson]

Yeah, there's absolutely management that needs to be done. I read some articles by a guy who went around managing small private ponds for bluegill size because he was young (college-ish) age and it was something he really liked. He got people to agree to let him manage them. Seemed pretty successful, eventually the ponds produced one pound bluegills and basically all you can catch small bass. Which are also fun.

People struggle with some of the management. Depending on what you're doing you basically need to kill every fish you catch that isn't "trophy" size.