Eastland :

I read your first post 3 times. A very interesting discussion by all. I think we are trying to compare to many variables in several very different fish species. Tilapia are not predator fish in any normal sense. A cricket is not their normal food . They eat plankton and plants etc. If the ones in the pond are eating crickets that is where I would start the search and ask why are they eating outside their food range in the pond.

BG and bass are to different from tilapia to compare their genetic traits whether in terms of the hard wired ones { like reproduction or predatory nature} or the genetic rate of change to conditioned ones like eating pellets. For example I have kept and feed BG and LMB in an aquarium on feed. They will always stop eating feed to eat a live prey put in like tadpoles or crickets even if they have just gorged on feed. They go into a feeding frenzy when the live prey hits the water and do not stop until all are eaten. We talked about that at DFW. Eating is a genetic response based on metabolism which is in part controlled by water temp. , day length changes , growth rate and a host of other factors and restricted by other factors like waryness , water conditions , and the presence of larger predators. I hope this helps some. One thing to note-- feed trained LMB do move away from eating pellets as they stay in the pond longer and their offsring are far less likely to eat pellets ( become conditioned). They are moving away from the conditioned response toward their genetic response. ewest