Bill my experience is if you are using fishing to do the survey, you will be getting a higher percentage of GSF and HBG if they are present than the representative population. They tend to be more aggressive and more likely to beat a BG to the hook. I have the same experience trapping them with minnow traps. The GSF and HBG are more prone to go in the traps than the straight BG, even though the BG go in pretty well.
This appears to be even more so if fishing in shallow water. It seems to me the GSF and the HBG, at least till they get up to larger sizes, hang close to the shore line or in shallow water. I feed some AM400 in shallow water, and it is more common to see a relative larger size HBG come up close to shore to get the AM400 in competition with the hundreds of fingerling BG than my regular similar sized BG. I hand feed almost every day and see this regularly. The whitish/yellow tipping on the HBG are easy to spot. The CNBG I've been putting in from my sediment pond may complicate that visual observation some day as they also have white tipping on the fins.
In my shallows when the water is reasonably clear I can observe this visually. Any GSF or HBG stick out like a sore thumb with the white, yellow or reddish fin margins. I can see hundreds of small BG and only a few hybrids and a rare GSF. But if I put a minnow trap in, the HBG or GSF gravitate to it. I threw in a minnow trap in for the kids to see some small fish Saturday and picked up several of the small GSF I had recently put in from my sediment pond. They are a tiny portion of the general population, yet they found their way into the trap for the feed.
In another example, when I started fishing about a year after stocking the BG, I was catching quite a few HBG. At first I thought I had a bunch of them. Well after about the 30 or so mark over a few months of moving them to my old pond, I hardly ever catch one. In fact this year I have only caught one that would have been of the original stockers (have been catching some of the later ones I have introduced from my sediment pond but they are much smaller). Point is out of hundreds and hundreds of original stocked BG, I fished out the majority of the 30 or so hybrids that were accidentally in with the BG within a few months. Yet had I based my population on a fishing survey early on I would have thought I had a fairly good percentage of HBG.
Anything with some GSF in it just likes to get on a hook or go in a trap for feed. They are chow hounds.
Last edited by snrub; 06/27/16 09:55 AM.
