Would be great to get a slug of data from the Tx Big Do. One could never say for certain that a fish was wholly pellet fed unless you have a single-species pond that is a strict piscivore (upon adulthood), so I don't know how we could try to categorize our data to determine effect of feed/growth.
Would be an interesting MS thesis to do a controlled experiment to determine the effect of feeding & growth rate on relative proportions. But it would be a multi-year effort.
To be fair with the concept, does this not open the opposite possibility that the YP data is correct? If those YP are exceptionally slow-growing in Lake Michigan, no pellet feed, cold winters, short growing season, poor prey source, then would it not follow that for the body length they would have relatively large gapes?
