Snipe,

This is a great observation and thank you for reporting. Although TP eat a lot of vegetation and can very efficiently utilize this food source .... they are considered omnivores. So they are going to eat everything your perch and lepomis are eating including their own and other small fry. They are a much stronger fish at the same length as a bluegill and will tend to outcompete them for spawning space and formulated feed.

Make no mistake, TP eat fry when they can. In fry rearing ponds, the most important practice for maximizing fry production is to remove parental fish just before the oldest fry reach a size they begin eating fry. This is generally around 3/4 of an inch and equates to about a 21 day spawn cycle. The brood-fish are removed by a large mesh seine leaving a pond full of small fry that can be grown insitu or transferred to fry grow out ponds. Just like with LMB, growing fry that are similar in size reduces cannibalism

Tiliapia are very good for BOWs where largemouth bass are a focus. IMHO opinion, they reduce recruitment of other forage species to include BG. This may be one reason many note that BG growth is good in their presence. Some say that Tilapia feed BG resulting in large BG. I am skeptical. I think it far more likely that fewer BG result in larger BG because of a reduction of intra-specie competition. For LMB greater than 16" ... tilapia can produce more forage than can BG. They can because they are omnivores that can also utilize primary production and so attain much higher standing weights.

I think a BOW where forage fish less than 2" is very important to goals .... TP would not foster these goals because they would reduce the availability of this size prey. One the other hand, if a person had a means of producing many small fry to introduce in mid-August and later, they might add a lot of prey from 3/4" to 2 1/2 "

It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so - Will Rogers