I think this is a very interesting topic and I recall a term paper that was turned in for wildlife biology class that may explain a little. Granted this was a long time ago but it had to do with the conditioning of all animals from birds, squirrels, deer and turkey at feeders, humans on foodstamps and welfare, fish being fed at regular intervals etc...... the point to his paper was that with all animals studied that were being fed at very regular intervals they all became "lazy" and slowly became reliant on the free hand outs and became less adapt at foraging for themselves. In a lot of situations some became so dependant on the handouts that if they abruptley discontinued then the animals would stress out in varying degrees depending on how long they had been fed. Some would actually starve to death depending on the time of year. I think some examples were discussed recently in another thread on deer feeding. Based on his findings animals in a different control group that were fed but not at regular intervals did not stop foraging on their own between feedings and did not show the same dependicies or the same stress symptons when feeding was discontinued. His sugggestions for feeding wildlife was to never fill the feeders and to let them remain empty for short periods of time to keep the animals being fed from getting 'lazy". He supported feeding but just not at regular intervals. It would be interesting to have two ponds and experiment with different feeding tactics to see if catchability or wr were effected by the different feeding tactics implemented. Use regular feeding times on one pond and scattered random feedings on the other. On the pond with scattered irregular feeding times perhaps net off a small shallow section of the pond so that only the small forage fish could gain access and feed them on a regular schedule so that the larger fish consuming them could benefit from the forage feeding without actually becoming dependant on pellets.
