Strange experience on a pond yesterday

I’ve been on a kick this year of trying new ponds that I haven’t fished before, hoping to find a hidden treasure of bull gills or slab crappies. So far I’ve been rewarded with dink gills and the occasional bass or catfish. Yesterday I fished the Brown Deer pond in Coralville at sunup and in 3 hours caught only two bass and very seldom even marked a fish. So I left deciding to try one of these ponds I’ve never tried before. This one is close to home but I’ve never actually seen it, just talked to the owner. I also knew from talking to him that there were fish in it but no one has fished it for years. When I got there I saw it wasn’t more than 1/4 acre tops. It looked more like a swimming pool than a pond. I punched 3 holes down the center and found it was 7′ deep at the deepest, but I marked fish right away. As soon as I could drop a bait I had a fish on. They were genereally decent sized “gills” but they looked different. They were colored kind of like a Pumpkinseed and their mouths were a little bigger than normal. At first I thought they were hybrid bluegills, but I started catching all sizes from dinks to about 8″. I know the owener hasn’t been putting fish in and hybrids supposedly don’t reproduce so that didn’t explain the dinks. I also caught about 4 of what I call “warmouth”. These are the little bluegill-like critters that seem to hang around shallow cover in a lot of our lakes. They’re more brightly colored than a blugill and sort of look like a tiny peacock bass. The “bluegills” I was catching looked like a cross between a regular gill and these “warmouth”. Is that possible? Has anyone else run into that before?

I’ve caught those little suckers before to! I kinda thought they looked like a cross between a pumpkinseed and a rock bass. Hard saying not knowing though…

there is a farm pond just down the road from my house that is loaded with these creatures… it is relatively new (2 years) and is already ruined with the presence of these fish.. that is all you catch!! they are almost like a bad bluegill and will eat anything in sight. im not one to kill a fish if i am not eating it, but these fish are not healthy for a pond and do no good other than eat everything and fun to catch

They sound like warmouths….a cross between a member of the sunfish family and the rock bass. Strange lookers though with the larger than normal mouth.

hybrids will reproduce but 80 or 90 % are male so there is little reproduction if ther are only hybrids in the pond

Probably hybrids. A very small percentage will reproduce but the resulting offspring will not grow to the size of the fish from the original stocking. One of the reasons I would not recommend the stocking of hybrids.