Waste of money planting fatheads in an established fish population. The SMB will wipe them out. It's an on going practice by some unscrupulous fish farms to tell people they need to plant fatheads in an established fish population.
Why?
Fatheads are slow moving and easy to capture
It takes 10 lbs. of forage fish to produce 1 lb. of predator fish.
I don't know about you, but if I planted as many as 100 lbs. of fatheads and ended up with only 10 lbs. of weight gain in my predator fish population, I'd think that was a waste of money.
However planting fatheads in a new pond --allowing them to reproduce exponentially before predator fish are planted -- isn't a bad idea. Then once the predator fish are planted they get a jump start before another forage fish species (such as bluegill) can take up the slack when the fatheads are wiped out. The bluegills spawn more than once a year and in a balanced pond will keep up with predation.
With smallmouth bass you would be better off with yellow perch as your forage base but will want to do some culling of yellow perch.
Last edited by Cecil Baird1; 12/03/13 08:52 AM.
