Buckeye,
Removing settled solids soon after deposition does a lot to take the bioload demand off the biofilter. The more solids that can be removed the better. Your biofilter may be large enough depending on how many fish you finally have going into winter. An important part of the system is how well you can keep the plants actively growing to clean the water in the biofilter. Don't forget the koi pond biofilter was outside and receiving ambient temperatures and sunshine.
It is not practical to feed most of those bass live ("dead") food all winter to accomplish decent average growth rates to stocking size by spring. Eating fresh food, they will eat you out of "house and home" and flatten your wallet if you DAILY feed them enough for them to stay fat and grow appreciably by spring. Getting as many as possible by initially intensively working with them to eat pellets, will be a much more practical way to get the desired growth from those "basement" bass.
If you use my methods expect at least 80% of the SMB to go to pellets and at least 60% of the LMB to learn to eat pellets. I've had very good luck training Fender's strain of SMB to eat food.
I am not sure how mixing LMB and SMB will affect the numbers of each that learn to eat food. I have never mixed SMB & LMB while feed training. I think the LMB could intimidate the SMB enough that SMB might be hesitant to feed or at least not feed enough to grow well. Only way to know is try it. Worst case if the intimidation is strong, you can net out all fish and use/install a fence or blocking net to divide the tank to segregate the two species.
Keep us advised of your progress. I am interested in how much growth you can get from your "basement bass" by spring. Do you have any length measurements of the LMB and SMB?. Whenever you remove some of the non-eating bass (live or dead) please measure their lengths for us.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 10/22/07 09:33 PM.
