The top secret redears actually will eat pieces of crawlers like there's no tomorrow. They're kind of iffy on krill, but they're warming to the idea. I think the fact that the water is only about 54 degrees is slowing the training process. Theo has convinced me to withold the crawlers to get them more agressive toward the krill and that's working so far. I've even been hiding 1.5 mm pellets inside of the worms with a tweezers. I'm going to try the chopped worm/pellet mix next week. It's all very exciting. What do you think of that bluegill that's just 23 weeks old right now? He's the number one fish.
The scale is from Wal-mart. I can zero it out with anything on it, then place a new item to get a weight. It's working really nice and it was quite cheap. I think it was twenty-some-odd dollars. It is battery operated, but I don't know what a tare feature is. It matches up quite consistantly with the more expensive produce I bought from Aquatic Eco-systems.
I don't know if I mentioned this, but I now take the sweeper nozzles and smash them flat with a hammer. There's less water that comes through but at a higher pressure. The redear tank isn't even using an aerator! I was pretty happy to save the electrical cost, and less water cost, too! Take a look at that near tank. Doesn't it look like I'm spraying a lot of water in there? In actuality it's only about four tenths of a gpm.
By the way, as a reminder to everybody, I still really envy Cecil and his monster trout and perch. That is the
entire motivation to my project.
...and again, thanks to all of you guys for continued comments, encouragement, and mostly for the great advice. I've already been privileged to catch by hook and line some of the perch that were raised last winter (see my profile picture), but I honesly believe that I can use the system to select for fast growth feed training and agressiveness which could make a recreational pond a lot more fun for my Dad or my kids. It's also a great way of course to get your hatchery fish larger in an economical way, before releasing into your bigger pond where all of the nasty predators live.
