i do try as much as possible to feed frequently. especially in the early days/weeks. My thinking is you need to give the crappie as much opportunity as possible to see/react to the bluegill feeding/competition.
On weekends i would sprinkle a few pellets into the tank pretty much every time i thought about it.. which would be about every 2 hours or so. on weekdays i would do one feeding before work, one when i got home and one before bed so roughly 4-8 hours between feedings. An automatic feeder would be better but its not necessary as you can see. You may have better results with it, i am sure there's still lots of room for improvement as this is still only my second successful bcp feed training experiment.
The bluegill and catfish help process excess food and really theres only a couple of things i havent covered.
1) You have to have a lot of filtration to process the ammonia and nitrites. The system ****MUST MUST MUST**** ALREADY be cycled and mature before adding the fish. With small diameter feed and powders it is very difficult to keep the water clean. I have 1 radial flow filter , 1 settling tank, 3 MBBR filters with approx 9 cu ft of k1 type media(each). And the water was still so fowl i couldnt even see the fish in there. But the water chemistry was fine.. ammonia and nitrites stayed low and i had to sometimes add lime to keep the PH from plummeting.
All filters were DIY from blue barrels. I did add a sand filter during the trial to help catch the really fine suspended particles and it did help a lot.
2) you need to source healthy fish. This is what i find to be the absolute most challenging part of feed training crappie is finding healthy fish. I find that acquiring healthy black crappie from even the best, most reputable pond stocking suppliers and fish farms to be a complete crap shoot. These same farms have always provided me with healthy channel cats, bg, hsb, res, and LMB.. but crappie are different and the quality is never consistent. Maybe someone more knowledgeable on the process can correct anything i am about to say or offer some good advice but here's how i understand it.
A week or more before the order/delivery is to be done(with all fish types not just crappie) .. the fish farm will seine their pond and put the fish in a holding tank. I say a week ore more, because i think its likely it is often much longer than 1 week. Why seine the pond each week for the orders due that weekend? Wouldnt we just seine the whole pond, have the fish on standby in the holding tank as orders come in? they could be there two, three, four ,five, more weeks? They withhold feed because the "fish travel better on an empty stomach" [and i am sure there is something to do with not producing ammonia in the travelling tanks. but i digress] Then on delivery day the fish are loaded onto a truck and taken to their destination. If a BG is in a holding tank and isnt sold... they can just feed it some commercial pellets and keep it healthy for next week... this doesnt seem to be done with crappie. So anyway. I call ahead to my pond stocking place.. i find out what day they get black crappie and i go within a couple of days of their delivery to get my fish. Sometimes they are healthy, sometimes they arent. And when feed training.. you MUST START WITH HEALTHY FISH. Black crappie like other fish are filter feeders. When they get to a certain stage of starvation they STOP HUNTING. They use as little energy as possible and just try to live off of plankton in the water by catching it in their gills. They *MIGHT* survive in a pond setting doing this but not in a concentrated RAS. As far as i am concerned... fish in this state are DOA.
I'd me remiss if i didnt also mention that crappie stress easily in handling and i am sure this is a factor as well.
I could go on.. i have twice gone to the fish farm themselves (which is a very long out of state drive.) One time i got great healthy fish... the other time all 200 were already starving and died withing a couple of days. I went the next week to a more local pond stocking place (who gets their bcp from the same farm) and these fish were much healthier. I still lost about half the fish in the first 3-4 days which to me is from stress and handling as opposed to refusing to feed train. Typically a healthy fish refusing to feed train will take a couple of weeks to die in which i had only a handful of deaths after the first week.
Anyway, i apologize for so many words and i know they arent well organized. its just a brain dump that i can read later so i hopefully dont forget anything and you are welcome to read it (or not)
brian
