No offense but the fish look somewhat stunted with the large eyes etc.
No offsense taken at all Cecil, I noticed the same thing. Not all them them looked that way but a significant number did. I have already had seven of them go belly up including the ones pictured with the two GSF.
CJ, the RES came from Orscheln Farm & Home, they are a chain store in Nebraska and Iowa and do their annual "Fish Day" via Arkansas Pond Stockers. (Yeah, I know.) Orceheln is licensed to sell fish here in Nebraska they do sell a lot of fish. You should have seen the line of people waiting to pick up fish in a light rain and some of them had really large orders they were picking up.
The good news is that I'm only out $6.92 out of my own pocket after the gift certificate and anything questionable never made it into my pond. I pre-planned to look at each individual fish before putting them in the pond since this outfit is out of Arkansas and the RES were advertised as 1-3", I knew the smaller ones would be hard to distinguish between BG and BG are not in my stocking plans, at least not yet.
At this point I don't want any other type of sunfish in my pond as it would screw up my pond plan. I set up second small RAS tank several weeks ago just for this purpose not knowing what to expect today. I can see one or two of the wrong type of fish mixed in with others, but to have 60% of what were supposed to be RES actually be GSF was pure BS and had to be intentional.
Personally I would not have gone this route except for the gift certificate from my mother in law who was just trying to be helpful.
On a brighter note I did pick up small number of very healthy 4-6" pellet trained YP from TJ's favorite supplier earlier this week. They were eating pellets within 20 minutes of going in my smaller RAS system and I waited that long before tossing in a few pellets just to see what they would do.
I have put a few of smaller YP in with my SMB fingerlings to clean up the pellets the SMB don't eat, the rest went into the pond after a few days in the RAS. I hope the SMB will start taking pellets off the surface soon, right now they are just eating pre-softened pellets that sink, they might learn something from watching the YP feed on the surface.
