Cecil,
No offense taken.
I'm in the business of providing results, not peer reviewed papers. My clients pay me based on what I know and what I can do.
I've got 8 ponds on my property that have different purposes. During my span with Dr. Griffin, I've proven four times that the AquaMax 500 diets convert feed into bluegills at 1.3-1 rate. I've done it in two small, .1 acre ponds, fed and monitored every day. We started with with 25 pounds of adult bluegills March 1 and fed them until Thanksgiving, when we drained the pond, weighed, sorted and counted the fish. Did that two years in a row with each pond. We started with 55 to 75 fish. We ended with slightly different amounts each time, somewhat due to predators (great blue herons love small ponds loaded with bluegills) and one fish kill (because I didn't pay attention to water quality). Each pond is filled with well water and has a drain. The best we did was the second year when we harvested 238 pounds of bluegill from one pond. Of those fish, the 55 original bluegills were each captured and weighed a total of 62.5 pounds. First spawn bluegills weighed about 120 pounds. There were more than 8,000 of those. Second spawn fish weighed about 35 pounds. There were 5,000 of those. Third spawn fish remained and they were less than 2" long.
We fed 6 bags of AquaMax 500 to this pond. Not for a minute do I believe the newly hatched fish ate this fish food. Never saw one come to the feeder. The water stayed green from mid-April until harvest and we didn't add a drop of fertilizer.
I didn't make this stuff up.
We sacrificed a few fish for their livers and body content.
I sold the remaining fish, reported the data to Mark Griffin and we moved forward.
Regarding the AquaMax Largemouth, when Griffin first created it, we fed it to largemouth bass in Richmond Mill Lake. I sent him several fish early on because I was concerned about their livers and body fat content. We both agreed there was too much fat and the fish weren't a natural color. Griffin tweaked the feed, sent another load and we fed it. He reduced the amount of fat, added more fish meal, changed the starches a little bit, changed the vitamin package and it made a huge difference.
We knew how many fish we started with, weighed and measured a significant sample of individuals and had a starting weight. We know how much we've fed and what the growth rates have been. I've electrofished the lake three times and anglers keep good records. Where we do get a little lost on this lake is that, due to its size, we have no idea what the attrition is. We can go by growth rates of bass without the ability to harvest, weigh and measure every fish in the lake.
What we do know is how much the landowner has paid for the feed, how much feed we've fed and what the growth rates are consistently. From that, we extrapolate feed conversion rates. As the fish have grown larger, the conversion rates seems to be dropping. I'll shock the lake in November and gather the latest round of data.
I wish I had a way to do more scientific research, but it doesn't pay well in the private sector.
So, no offense to you and none taken here. I know what I've seen and I know what my clients like and I've seen what works right now. I'd love to see the feed companies offer more data.
