BuckeyeW - Your first step is to get the fish to eat non-swimming food that is dropping in the water column. Chopped worms into 3/8"-1/2" sections is one way to start. Another way is to add minnows that are almost dead and have very little swimming ability then gradually make additional minnows more lifeless, until the bass are eating dead minnows. Then switch to chopped minnows, then chopped fish. (Fish method is usually slower than worm method.)
Once you have them eating "dead" live food gradually add softened pellets to the chopped worms. I find it is beneficial to mix chopped worms or fish with soft pellets as a clay type mixture and pinch and roll it into small pellets. The chopped meat adds flavor to pellets and a higher percent of bass will initially accept soft pellets. Gradually reduce amount of worms and increase amount of soft pellets. The whole process should take about a week. After about 7-10 days the bass that will eat pellets will be eating the soft pellets. Non-pelleting eating fish will likely starve to death.
I think you have too many fish in the tote. The HyBG will be more problem for you than benefit. I do not think your bog biofilter is large enough for your final fish biomass that will occur in April 08. I would not risk water quality problems by having the HyBG take up the valuable water quality space (see next).
For teaching purposes, I would reduce the number of or eliminate HyBG. They will hog the "dead" live food that you use for teaching purposes and it will take way too much food to get the bass trained. You do not need more than one or two HBG (at most 4 HBG) to act as teacher fish. If you are primarily interested in getting the bass to eat pellets then you do not need any HBG since you have SMB. SMB as a rule will be much quicker/easier to train to eat pellets than the LMB. Then the SMB will act as all the teacher fish you need to encourage the LMB to feed if they are inclined to eat non-swimming food. Once you know (2-3wks) which bass are eating pellets then remove all non-pellet eating bass to make water quality "room" for the remaining feed trained fish. You will need all the higher water quality that you can get to successfully achieve your goal of pellet trained bass for spring of 2008.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 10/21/07 07:39 PM.
