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, thank you so much for sharing all this! For those of us with BCP containing ponds, I think this information is rare and valuable. I wish I was closer to your experiment, so I could offer some crappie from our pond for your use, but it's a long way between Iowa and Texas!
"Politics": derived from 'poly' meaning many, and 'tics' meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.
I'm currently feed training six or seven dozen RES in a 75 gallon insulated aquaculture tank with an aquarium heater set at 78 degrees. They have really taken to hydrated feed (homemade optimal crumbles). I am doing a 10 to 15% daily water changes while removing mostly waste with very little uneaten food. The aquarium heater really keeps the water temp at an optimal temperature even with the frequent water changes. After 4 weeks I would say that 75% to 80% that are readily eating feed, so far no morts. I did dip a glass full of daphnia out of the pond tonight and added them to the tank, the feed trained RES ignored them while those that aren't quite there yet gobbled them up.
unlike the first time i did not bother trying to feed them non commercial feed like bloodworms or beefheart, etc. I have only used commercial feed and i dont bother to hydrate it. I may have done so for the first week but not significantly overall.
The one thing i did do better is size the feed better for gape. As fish grow at different rates. its common for me to mix my feedings with two sizes as and of course as a process when transitioning to the larger diameter feed.
Feeds that i used (this time) are: purina Aquamax 100 optimal Starter Feed #2 purina aquamax 300 purina aquamax 400
optimal fingerling line is significantly more expensive per lb than the purina fingerling line but the ability to buy 10lb buckets instead of 50lb bags is a nice advantage.(i also very much like the resealable/reusable buckets) The reason i am using purina so much is because the 100 was left over from last year and optimal had not yet released their fingerling starter when i NEEDED to order the next size up pellet.
Right now i do not have a recommendation on pellet type brand other than it should be "complete diet", appropriate protein/nutrients for the fish's age and the right size for the fish's gape. I do not have the infrastructure to do much in the way of side by side comparisons so i will probably never have any good data in that respect. I will say i am moving all of my feeds to optimal but i cant say that i have any reason or data to say its better than the other. Its just a decision based on peripheral reasons and personal preference.
I started this batch of RES out on bloodworms and the homemade hydrated crumbles. One thing I have noticed about the hydrated feed is that they will eat much larger peices of the hydrated feed, I assume the softer texture is easier to swallow, if it is dry they prefer much smaller peices. I am running a mix of Optimal BG and Optimal bass through a coffee bean grinder, pouring the mix into a wire mesh strainer, then shaking it back and so the fine dust and very small peices fall out the bottom. Larger peices tend to work their way to the top of the strainer and smaller peices toward the bottom. The nice thing is that there is a nice mix of sizes to feed them. I try and sort it so I hydrate the larger sizes and put the smaller sizes in an automatic feeder that feeds them four times a day while I am gone. I do like to hydrate the crumbles then let it dry out a bit before feeding, the stuff I hydrate in the morning gets fed in the evening and vica versa. This has worked much better than my previous run at feed training RES. Give hydrated feed a try with your crappie and see if it helps.
Thanks for the update! Those CC are certainly lively! Can you give me the dimensions of that CC tank? It is probably hard to measure diameter so a distance around (circumference) or rough diameter and height would be helpful. I have a tight spot to fit a tank in and wonder the dimensions on yours.
not a lot of updates. But i am still here. There just hasnt been a lot of interesting developments.
These are the same crappie from before.. They are in the 5-7" range now... Out of those 200 crappie i have under 20 left.
The future plans for these guys is to try to reproduce them in aquariums like i did with the bluegill and red eared sunfish (see my breading bluegill in 100 gallon aquarium thread) I will separate these into two breeding groups.. A small group of 5 or 6 will go into a 200 gallon demo system i have on my back porch ad the rest will stay in that 700 gallon ferrocement tank
Crappie are my favorite fish. Problem being is there is not a lot of info on them. After 5 years mine still have not overpopulated as bad as the LMB have.i guess the “ It All depends” really holds true.
Despite the fact that you wrote such a long post, it was really interesting for me to read it. Thanks for sharing. Good luck! I have always been interested in topics related to aquariums. I think that they constantly need to be improved, as this will improve the standard of living of the fish we care for. I love my fish very much, so I am constantly improving something in their aquarium. For example, I recently purchased a new heater thanks to www.vivofish.com/best-aquarium-heater/ . The old one is already missing, since it is not very powerful. I had to work hard to find a really high quality heater, but I succeeded. I'm sure my fish like this new acquisition very much.
Last edited by GabrielleSimpson; 08/31/2006:50 PM.
