Thank you for your detailed response. With your experience with the pump, have you had problems when its leaves and muck of decomposing leaves that you are sucking with the algae? Have you heard of problems with tilapia? i read somewhere that they only end up taking care of maybe 10% of the algae and can hurt bluegill populations by chasing them away from their food.
I've used tilapia and find that they do a good job on algae. At least, I've never had algae problems at all. They won't do much against excess pondweeds, though.
Tilapia do eat fish pellets, but mine seem less aggressive at the feeder than BG, LMB, and hybrid stripers. Maybe if you had huge numbers of starving tilapia it would be different, but they really don't seem to crowd out other fish when the dinner bell rings.
Bob Lusk has stated that tilapia correlate with increased young of year BG survival, possibly because the BG eat some small tilapia instead of YOY BG. Certainly my CNBG have done very well alongside tilapia.
