maki - if the bass and perch were not trained to eat fish food when you bought them then you you can expect some will not eat pellets. The percentage will vary that learns to eat fish food - my guess is 60%-70% will learn to eat fish food. That is a pretty good food trained amount if you can get it on your first try. I will provide some comments - questions:

1. Do the tanks have water flow through systems or are they non-flow through?

2. After the fish have been feeding for about 2 -3 weeks I would sort through them and grade out the skinny non-pelleting eating individuals. Put these skinny fish in your pond. Some may get lucky and survive. If you leave them in the tank with the others they will either starve to death or get eaten by the larger faster growing siblings.

3. Once the SMB start eating food well approximately 2-4 wks start decreasing the frequency of the feedings to four/day for a dew days then reduce again to twice a day. This will improve water quality, reduce amount of wasted food and cause the fish to fed more aggresively.

4. I think the snails came in with the fish transfer water as eggs or very small individuals. I wouldn't be overly concedrned about viral infections from the snails especially since they were either started from eggs or very small newly hatched or young snails. If introduction was during early life stages, they had very little time to become infected with disease organisms.

5. Did you get the fish from Hicklings in NY?.

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