Jim, Good information and ideas.
The problem that I have found with the rare top end predator in a perch or bass pond is difficulty in catching them when you want to and at the ideal size. One tends to always catch them when they are too small or too big or not at all. Frustrating. The darn fish won't read or follow the game plan.
I have an interesting perch fishery to tell you about. Small pond 0.2 ac, stocked first with FHM, bluntnose minnows, and grass shrimp. It cooks for one season. To this over a two year period we add 100 pellet conditioned just female YP 8"-9" long (B.Lynch Farm). Fish were well conditioned to AMax pellets. Owner after about a year got lazy and rarely fed perch since there appeared to be so many minnows present; why add pellets. Now he has lots of very thin bodied (very low Wr) perch and still an abundance of minnows and shrimp - mostly bluntnose. I wouldn't have believed it unless I saw it first hand. The YP looked so bad this summer when they came up for a pellet offering, I felt sorry for them many were to a point of being emaciated.
You mention - "I think that having a subpopulation of trained fish will help to train the others." I also am a firm believer of using "teacher" fish when training larger fish such as YP and BG to pellets. As you know competition, hunger, and crowding also probably play a big part in fish learning to "try" a sinking or floating food. Trying vs accepting are two very important items in pellet training fish. Your method of training perch works very well, for as you mention, training fry and post larval YP. The YP I primarily work with for feed training are a minimum 3" and maximum 7" long. Above I called them YOY perch but many of them are 6-16 months old when feed training starts. They require a little different size and consistancy of starter food but flavors and basic ingredients are similar to your methods.
Again, welcome to this Forum. We are always excited to have another official "fish squeezer" among us.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 01/27/10 10:05 PM.
