Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations pellet eating LMB

I have posted on this subject in the past, but wanted to see if others have had the same experiences. I have had my pond for some time now and I have noticed that over the past year more and more of the LMB have been eating the catfish food. My guess is that they have been doing this for a lot longer and I did not notice until the water cleared up. On any evening you can see the LMB come up and eat the feed and here is the weird part, they don't strike it as one would expect, but slowly come up and suck down the pellets.

I did not stock feed trained bass and I guess that this is just learned behavior. Most people would say that this is not a problem and would even say that it is a blessing, but there seems to be a side effect. The bass have quit hitting lures and appear to have settled into a diet of just pellets. The pond is full of baby blue gill and they are eating pellets right along side of the LMB. Has anyone else seen this type of behavior or is this problem just endemic to my pond.

Newbee, haven't heard from you lately.

I occasionally notice LMB eating pellets but not often. Since I don't feed on a daily basis, it is seldom repeated. When they take the feed, it is like they are swinging up, taking it and going down. They neither strike it nor suck it in.

Newbee,

Yes, I have seen it also. The effect in my ponds has been that LMB are virtually impossible to catch on lures/flies. I must admit, I'm somewhat disillusioned with the touted management techniques. Fishing in my ponds was much better when the bass were hungry, before feeding, fertilizing, and aerating. I have lots of fat bluegill, but the desired bass fishing has fallen considerably short of expectations.

Our mature LMB have also become pellet trained, and/or attracted to feast on the BG feeding frenzy. They are very difficult if not impossible to catch. We often observe them cruising around the feeder.

That’s the main reason I am presently concentrating on HSB, and will soon supplement with large sizes and numbers - let the fittest survive…..!

I want some tackle busters, which isn’t going to happen with LMB on a regular basis, with present management practice,

I believe my fish get too well/quickly educated in my small one acre ponds. Yes, they appear healthy when I catch them but I think they get hook shy too quickly.

Even my bluegills quit biting after I catch some of them.

Dave & George , I feed twice a day and have not noticed the bass eating the pellets , but they also are hard to catch on artificials . we can catch them on minnows [ catch & release ] but after awhile they get wise to this also . the brim do the same thing if we catch and release. but the c-cats are fairley easy to catch on shrimp - no release here - just eat !

Guys, I don't understand what is going on. You would think that this would be welcome news, but if you can't catch them you can't havest them and if you can't harvest them then you can't control them. The end result, over population and stunted bass. This is exactly what I did not want.

By the way I also see what appears to be bass in the three pound to four pound range cruising the feeder, as well as smaller ones. The funny thing is, they are eating right next to thousands of baby blue- gill and they just ignore them. I am not a biologist, but shouldn't they be eating those other fish and not the catfish pellets.

I have friends come by and it just tears them up that they can see all of these fish and they can't get them to bite at all.

newbee wish I could better explain, but wondering myself why your not catching either. When we stock fed trained bass I do it mostly b/c they are ultra agressive fish. They are either F1 or northerns and I like the norhtern lmb the most. Of course they grow quicker too because they supplement their normal fish diet. My point is they are easy to catch they hit about anything thrown towards them. They are especially good for fly fisherman.

I think Dave my be right do you fish the pond alot? If the pond is small fish get hook shy after being caught and released a few times. Has this just occured during the heat of the summer. Many times fish are lethargic during summer but easier to capture spring/fall ( I know you already knew that).

WIsh I could help. I would love to have bass on pellets. I can not even train northern bass that were not already on feed when purchased. They get skinny in my holding ponds and will not take pellets. I have got them to take small dead fish when thrown in with some live bluegill.

Newbee it sounds like you have just one happy community! Where every one just gets along..

Babby bluegills swiming right along with the big bass...sound like the bible scripture where "The Lion will lay down next to the baby lamb"

Seriously though....this is why I posted a message a while back on the pond fence idea!!! My idea was to put a fence in the pond that would have a mesh skinny enough to keep the bass and cats out, but let the bream in...it really sound like this is needed!! Some one really ought to try this I am sure it would work.
Fence of an area in the pond that is only for the blue gills. Maybe make the area really suited for blue gills in that you put sand in there as well...and what ever else Blue gill like to be around. the trick would be to find a fence that would keep most of the bass out but let ALL the blue gill in.

Newbee I have not heard too much about your blues man!...whats up with them? how are they doing???

Would simply stopping feeding make the Bass go back to eating the BG and help balance out the prob?

I think several things are happening together or interacting to cause your bass to not readily bite fish lures. This is a wide spread problem in ponds and lakes that are fished frequently. I think some of this common problem is directly related to the size of water body and the amount of fishing pressure it receives. Pellet eating bass may enhance the lure avoidence problem.

PREFACE. Bob Lusk and I had a very short discussion late this summer about learning versus conditioning of largemouth bass and other sport fish. The two words have different meanings, but for this discussion I will use learning and conditioning interchangeably and to mean basically the same thing.

NOTE: Cecil Baird thinks possibly that the bass you initially stocked in your pond may have been at one point raised on pellets since they readily started eating pellets later in life. As Greg Grimes said above, in his experience and in my and several other fish raisers experiences, larger bass are quite difficult to train to eat pellets. Something is suspicious about mid-size bass learning to eat low protein catfish pellets.

I think the bass in your pond were exposed to two stimuli at the same time; fishing pressure and pellet feeding. Pellet feeding provided them a means to get easy meals AND fishing pressure conditioned these pellet eating bass to be cautious of non-pelleted food. From my experience in smaller water bodies and even in larger waters, fishes’ avoidance of lures develops proportionally as catch and release increases. The main negative thing that I think eating pellets does to your bass is it keeps them fat and lazy; see info below.

SOME FACTORS TO CONSIDER
1. Genetics. If your bass are normal then some of your bass are genetically and individually smarter fish. Some strains or groups of bass may have higher percentages of innately “smarter” fish. I think this may be evidenced by your bass having learned to recognize that fish pellets are an acceptable and easy meal plus their current unwillingness to bite lures. Typically bass are easier to train to eat pellets the closer the bass is to 2” long. Lots of bass larger than 12” typically refuse to accept fish pellets. When a bass over 12” readily learns to accept fish pellets I think this fish is atypical, and it is different or unique for some reason. If I can apply human behavior traits to these fish then I will call them very starved or hungry, very dumb or very smart, very inquisitive, or very “open minded”. TX Parks and Wildlife researchers after a study of LMbass catchability concluded that individual bass vary in willingness to bite. They discovered that a certain percentage of bass in each population were uncatchable. Offspring from lure avoiding bass produced larger percentages of lure avoiding young.

2. Hunger. Generally a well fed or full bass usually is not as aggressive as a hungry bass. Exceptions occur. A bass that is well fed and has a full belly is often not interested in chasing more food because this is “hard work”. I think full plump fish are more content and less aggressive than a hungry bass with an empty belly. As a general rule, the more hungry the bass, the more aggressive or brave it becomes. I think many animals exhibit this behavior.

3. Satiation. Well fed, pellet, eating bass soon “realizes” that food is regularly or easily available on a daily basis. These fish become conditioned to feeding at a certain time and on a certain type of food. They get lazy. They soon recognize pellets as basically the easiest thing to eat. I think this is similar to trout fisherman having to match the hatch in order to catch feeding trout. Fish can get quickly conditioned in a form of tunnel vision or narrow minded as to what they recognize as current food items of choice.

4. Conditioning. I think most all fish can be conditioned to recognize lures as things to avoid. In each population some fish are conditioned very quickly (smart), many are average and some get conditioned very slowly (dumb). Practicing catch and release reinforces conditioning of the fish to avoid lures. They learn at different rates but most I think can learn fairly quickly. How long do you think it would take your dog or several dogs to learn to avoid a bone with a treble hook hanging on it, if you hooked him once or twice and pulled him around by the jaw? Some of those dogs would learn just from observation to avoid you and the bone having a string & a hook. The bass in my old pond could recognize a fish pole and feeding would pretty much cease. When well conditioned, I think some fish are smarter than the person trying to catch them because often the fish "wins".

I have observed several conditioned bass quickly approach and investigate a natural lure dropped into the water. As soon as the first bass recognizes it is a fake, it turns and swims away and the others almost at the same time do the same thing without apparently examining the fake food item. They realize from their conditioning that if the first fish does not want it they do not want it either or they need to be cautious. Compare this behavior to naive bass or several bass that recognize food as food, and then all of them are competing desperately to get the piece of food. When ice fishing in my pond for large yellow perch I can watch a cautious perch decide not to bite a dead minnow. Since my perch receive little fishing pressure, if I jiggle the minnow a little bit another greedy perch on the sidelines will quickly grab the easy “bait”.

5. Over fishing. The more frequently fish are exposed to lures the quicker they become hook smart and conditioned to avoid anything unnatural or that does not look like a real food item or a pellet if they are eating pellets. The frequency and duration of time spent fishing and the size of the pond all contribute to conditioning of fish to lures.

6. Water Clarity. In clearer water fish can get a better view of the lure or bait. The better a fish can see the lure the less likely it is to accept a fake.

Practicing Catch & Release - Frequently catching, releasing, and re-catching a limited number of trophy bass in a small pond becomes a problem. Fish “wise up” and quickly especially when they get "JERKED AROUND BY THE JAW" and have to "fight" for their life. Their instinct is to survive. Fish are probably able to learn better than many give them credit for.

When the fish are “hunted” or fished, then animal behavior, conditioning and AVOIDENCE of baits & each fishes’ SURVIVAL SKILLS enter the picture. The more often the fish are exposed to lures & baits and are hooked, the more conditioned or experienced they become at avoiding being caught. By repetitively catching the same few confined fish you are training them to avoid biting things that are unnatural. The smaller the water body and the more often it is fished the worse this problem becomes.

One can “fairly easily” raise large bass or another type of fish in a small pond but placing intensive fishing pressure on them quickly trains them to avoid biting and recapture. So you are put in a catch 22 situation. You can produce trophy fish, but harassing them frequently with hook & line can produce fish that are more cautious and “hook smart”,and as a result are rarely caught, or even uncatchable.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED - Fishing in especially the small pond for the big fish should be done on a very limited basis IF one expects to be able to readily catch the larger, older fish whenever you do decide to fish for them. Using more refined fishing methods for the biggest fish can only work for a limited time. I have discovered that only occasional fishing (1x or 4x per yr) should be done in the small pond (less than 1 ac). The larger the pond or lake the more fishing pressure it can withstand before many of the fish become conditioned to avoid a certain lure. Mostly young fish are commonly caught in these situations. Change the lure and catch rate can improve until the fish get conditioned to the new lure, change the lure type again and fishing will improve, etc. Conditioned fish seem to learn to avoid a new lure faster than naive fish. With each new lure type presented to conditioned fish, this I think conditions the fish to get more and more cautious. I think a majority of the general fishing in a pond should be TAILORED specifically toward the smaller fish for purposes of management, thinning or monitoring of size, body condition, and numbers. Use small lures or baits and fish in shallow water during non-pellet feeding times and far away from the pellet distribution areas. The rare times that a large bass is caught, its body wt./condition needs to be assessed and recorded. A very important decision then needs to be made, return the conditioned fish or remove it from the gene pool.

Casual, recreational fishing and/or frequently (weekly or 2x monthly) fishing and or frequently trying to catch the big fish is counter productive and can relatively, quickly produce a population of large, hook smart fish. The smaller the pond the quicker this happens. When this happens, this will be evidenced over time by you more and more catching mostly smaller bass and more rarely catching the larger bass, but yet still seeing the big ones in feeding sessions. It can easily get to the situation that some of you have mentioned, “the bass will not bite on any lure”. The lure is probably something the bass has seen before or is too unnatural looking compared to what the bass typically eats that does not cause “jaw jerking” . In conclusion, the smaller the pond the less frequently it should be fished to minimize producing “hook smart large fish” or routinely replace old fish with naive or new fish.

Another option is as Double-Camp suggests, quit feeding the fish pellets, make them more hungry. In doing this you will have fewer and slower growing fish in your pond, but they may be a litle easier to catch; although maybe not especially if they are well conditioned to avoiding lures or unnatural items. I've seem large "smart bass" that are not fed pellets simply ignore all lures. She didn't get large by being dumb!

Bill,

I agree completely with your note. However, I would like to add another contributing factor from my experience. My bass, which includes stocked Floridas and native East Texas bass from 70 years ago generations, sometimes take pellets...but they ALWAYS line up to take Bluegill feeding on the pellets. The bluegill are highly concentrated during feeding and very vulnerable. The smart bass figure this out. They begin to congregate 15 minutes before the feeders go off and then gorge themselves on the unsuspecting bluegill once the feeders expell the feed. The Bluegill never figure this out or rather choose the feed over the risks of being devoured by Bass. It is really quite a show.

Bass in my pellet feed ponds are virtually uncatchable. Bass in much smaller non-feed ponds are readily catchable...even two to three times a month. In my small world, I believe that is attributable to both learning but more so to abundant bluegill that can be easily caught during feeding.

I'm well aware that my one sample does not a theory make or prove...but if one wants to catch bass rather than just watch them grow in a pond, you better seriously consider the subject of artificial feeding and what it can do to "catchability".

I was wondering if perhaps using bg as bait would make the smart bass a little less cautious. My thought is that if they can be caught on the food that they find the most security in then lures would be viewed in the same light. I plan on trying this in my pond for a while and see what happens.

Meadowlark - Bass feeding on bgill while the bgill are foraging on pellets is a very common occurrence since the bgill are as you say very vulnerable at this time. Another reeason the bass "line up for bgill" is because the bgill is a larger food item and eating one of them is much more energy efficient for the larger bass to eat than compared to pellets. Instinct may also contribute to this behavior.

From your description I assume that the pond with pellet fed bass does not have bgill. If true, then the pellet fed bass are basically conditoned to feed primarily on pellets and feeding options are limited. These fish have what I mentioned in the above post as having tunnel vision and basically only recognize pellets as food due to the low diversity of food items in in the bass/pellet pond. A habitat or pond with high diversity of forage items tends to keep the predators from getting a bad case of tunnel feeding vision; these bass tend to be more "expeimental" and "open minded" in their foraging and thus more "willing" to try something different. I think this is evidenced in the other pond that you mentioned with bluegill as additional forage items with the pellets. Bass fishing using lures is better there. Does this make sense?

pdreamer - In my experience the proper live bait "match the hatch" almost always works better than artificials, but artificials are more challenging. Isn't the challange what it is mostly about? Maybe not for some.

Bill,
All I have ever used in my pond is lures.I was just thinking maybe I could "dumd down" the those that will not take lures,make them think that nothing is totally safe. I guess you could say I'm trying to get into the mind of a fish which could be dangerous.

Just for the record I find my pellet trained bass are more easily harvested with soft baits. i.e. plastic worms. I also have no problem using a live nitecrawler or minnows for bait. I only get a few bass on spinner baits but the soft baits and live bait work like a charm.

Cecil - Yes as I mentioned earlier live bait especially fished finesse is very hard to beat for producing fish. I use it exclusively when I have to produce fish.

I suspect that in many of these other ponds where bass are difficult to catch the pond receives a significiently greater amount of fishing pressure than we "do" on our ponds. Very, enthusiastic, first time pondowners can easily get carried away with overfishing the pond, both in frequency and duration of time spent fishing time. They literally "hammer" the bass with lures. This behavior quickly conditions the fish to be lure shy. We don't see this as much in our ponds because we understand the consequences of over fishing and we continually harvest some of the lure shy fish which opens more "room" for newbees or naive replacements.

In my 1.5 acre pellet fed pond the coppernose bluegill is ambushed during feeding time by the Florida & Northern LMB I have stocked. Same as behavior mentioned above. I will not begin fishing for the LMB until next July/August. When I start fishing specifically for Bass it will be for harvest, so I won't be able to keep too many of them.

What I have noticed while fishing for the coppernose bg and redear this year, is that almost everytime I go fishing I will inadvertantly catch a bass. I'll hook a bluegill and the bass will take the bluegill or at least attempt it and get hooked. Sometimes I'll pull in the bass with the bluegill fins holding onto the bass. Its happening so much that I've been getting to the point of worrying about the bass not eating anymore bg due to their being caught on them hehe. However, I don't see that happening so far. It appears that if I wanted to guarantee catches of LMB I should simply use the bg that I catch as bait.

JM - Good, you are learning and getting things started properly with your fishery. Your patience with the bass will pay off in big dividends when you decide to catch and manage their numbers. Your bass in trying to eat your ocassional hooked bgill are telling you that they are not afraid of "the man with the stick". You cauld even make the bass even tamer by regularily tossing them a stunned smallish bgill. It is great fun to watch them converge on a descending bgill.

Our 4 acre lake probably gets much heavier fishing pressure than most lakes. We feed Aquamax 600. Catfish, bluegills, rock bass, white bass/HSB, goldeyes, LMB and SMB have all learned to take these pellets. The fish that take pellets are incredibly fat and we do catch them occassionally.

It seems that some species never learn and other species become hook shy very quickly. From dumbest to smartest are rock bass, white bass/HSB, SMB, bluegill/hybrid bluegill, crappie, walleye/sauger, catfish then LMB. At least in our experience, LMB really do learn faster than other species.

Norm,

I find your "ranking" interesting and it does agree with my experience. Also, it seems to support moving more toward HSB vs LMB, if one wants to catch fish (besides bluegill), including large fish on a regular basis.

I'm going in that direction in my largest pond, i.e HSB on a put and take basis. Stocking a few each fall and again in the spring. I personnally enjoy catching fish on the fly rod with my grandchildren...thats much more fun to me than observing LMB.

Sorry guys, I have not posted a response to all of your thoughts on my problems because of deer season.

First I would like to address a few of the explainations as to how this problem came about. I do not over fish my pond and as proof, to date I have caught and released a total of ten bass in three years. I do fish maybe once a week for catfish but that about it and very rarely do I fish for bluegill. As for the size of my pond, it is a little under a 1/2 acre, not a large pond by any means, but not so small as to be a contributing factor in my problems.

As for the bass eating the pellets. Some of you believe that my bass were pellet trained before they came to my pond. Maybe, but doubtful as they were about the size of a small minnow when first stocked. What really puzzles me is that they would rather eat the pellets than eat the bluegill. I have been trying to catch one of the bass to perform a autopsy and see what he as been eating. Maybe this will shed a little light on the subject.

This problem is not something that I can't overcome. I built the pond not as a trophy pond, but as a place I could relax and unwind from the stress of my job. If the bass just want to eat the pellets and not my bait well that's allright by me, but I am scared that they will overpopulate and eventually take over. But hey there are other pressing problems in this world. If this is all god has given me to deal with then I guess I'll be thankfull (LOL)

Newbee,

I still say they were probably pellet trained. Largemouths are trained at about 2 inches or less and that is quite small. It's more cost effective to grow them out to stocking size to train them on pellets. It takes 4/5/s less feed to feed them to stocking size on pellets vs. live feed like fatheads. A simple call to your supplier should answer your question.

Newbee did you read the last magazine article??It is supposed to be prety good. Have not got mine yet...How are the blues doing are they eating the pellets still right along with the Bass and bream?
Are youstill haveing mortality problems with them