Still not convinced I'd eat one... I did like cooking creek chubs up over the camp fire as a kid though.
There is a difference between chub and an ide. Haven't heard about eating chub without any proper cooking (except people with very special wishes :D) but ide can be used that way. I have tried it and it's not bad. Of course, it's not as fat as salmon/trout and fish bones makes the eating a bit hard but it tastes good. When I tried it for the first time, I wasn't sure that I really wanted to do it. But it's good.
It's interesting to not that it's classisfied as a predator.
How fast does it grow, and what are the usual angling methods used to catch them?
But, if you search for Leuciscus idus, they grow up to 40" in length! That's a BIG FHM!!!!
As I said, it's predatory behavior can differ in various places. If it has got enough possibilties to catch smaller minnows then ide will catch them. If there is lack of them then ide can eat snails and similar food. For example, a northern pike is such predator that eats fish and small animals ONLY.
40 inches mean over 1 meter in length. That sounds like some theoretical value that can be hardly ever seen in real life. For example, the record of this fish in Latvia is 0,72 m (~28"), 5,5 kg (~12lb). Once I saw this record in some serious world record table and that probably means that such size has to be considered as a big one. But anyway even 3 kg fish is a pleasant surprise when caught.
How do they get caught? If fishing goes on in a river then something similar to fly fishing technique can be used but a floating bug has to be used instead of small fly. Small spinner baits or crankbaits are good too.
In Latvia they aren't very often found in lakes so not much people try to catch only them there - such a pointless thing...
My understanding is they need current to spawn, being found mostly in large river and lakes and they ascend streams to spawn in the spring. So, they most likely would survive in your pond but would not reproduce in it.
I guess that you are wrong. They prefer rivers but ides can also live in lakes too and I've read about cases when ide has been the dominating fish in the lake. There should be no problems with reproducing. Anyway I'm going to buy some of these in the spring and before that I'm going to have a serious conversation with fishkeepers.
