Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Help how do you feed train fish

I have a 5 acre pond fresh stocked with BG Fathead minnows, redbreast sunfish and future SMB and CC. How do I feed train?

How do you feed train?

1) you buy them already feed trained.

2) you build fish cages, place young fish in the cages and acclimate them to eating pelleted fish food. You buy different sizes of fish food as they grow larger, feeders to feed 'em or have the time to feed them a couple times a day. You sort out the fastest growing, largest fish once a month or so, so the smaller ones aren't bullied to death.

It's not a simple process to feed train your own fish - it takes a pretty dedicated comitted pondmeister.

edit:

If you already have the fish in the pond, you can throw food in the pond and hope that they feed train themselves. That works best if you have an automated fish feeder. For the best rusults you should feed in the same place, at the same time EVERY day to get them acclimated to the food. The problem is that if there is a ton of natural forage in the pond, they might never feed train. Not many people have that rigid of a schedule 7 days a week, EVERY week that the water temps are above 60 degrees.

Edit: Sorry Scot looks like we posted at roughly the same time.

The BG and fathead minnows won't need to be feed trained most likely. If you consistently throw feed out in the same location at some point they will show up and show up on a regular basis.

As far as redbreast sunfish I have no idea if they will do the same. No experience with them.

Most likely your CC's will already be feed trained at the hatchery, and SMB will be extremely difficult to get on feed if they are not already feed trained. Also the larger a fish is the harder it will be to feed train them.

Typically feed training is best done when the fish are very small and they are crowded into small tanks where there isn't anything else to eat. It's either eat it, cannibalize your smaller neighbor(for predator fish and insufficient grading) or starve.

The crowding sets up a competitive feeding pattern which induces feeding on artificial feed.

This year I started my perch fry in a tank on ground up krill fore the first few days. It's amazing how unfeedtrained fish will take to krill instantly. In fact they will attack pieces much bigger than them.

To start, you might have to walk around the pond tossing out small amounts to see where the fish are. They might not, at first, come to where it is important/convenient to you to feed. After they get "hooked", move to where you want them to feed. They will come to wherever you are.

I may have missed it in reading the pros responses/advice above, but I had read on here when I started to feed to make a feed ring. It's anything that you can come up with that will float, make a complete circle so the feed don't get out, and secure it in the place that is best for the fish. Throw the feed into it. You may not need it if they have been used to feed, but with my scenario this worked out pretty good. Kept it from floating all over the pond, and the fish had never been on feed before.

Good advice. I might offer up the suggestion of starting with a good quality feed, one that utilizes fish meal as a primary ingredient.If it leaves an oily slick on the water as it sits there, I think the fish find it more attractive.

I have started a few ponds on feed that already had established, adult populations, and I'm sold on hydrating the feed for better acceptance. In the beginning you may notice the fish taking a pellet, then spitting it back out....softening the pellets by mixing them with water before feeding helped me alleviate this issue, and hastened the transition onto dry feed. This approach does require hand feeding, however.

Also, take note of the size of fish you intend to feed, and choose a pellet sized accordingly. Many here will mix sizes of feed together, and some like Game Fish Chow for that exact reason.

Thanks I will try a few ways

+1

I started out this spring with a 50/50 mix of 500/600 sized pellets and everybody ate. Now, I'm at a 1/3 500 and 2/3 600 mix. My larger CNBG will pick out the 600 sized pellets first, and only eat the smaller pellets after these are gone.

I absolutely believe that hand feeding my fish every day has provided me with much insight as to how and what a fish wants to eat. I still feel that if a particular situation would be best suited to a mechanical feeder, than they are invaluable. But I also think that a great many new pondowners who rush out and purchase feeders because they're simply on the "list", may be missing out.

As an example, I hand feed four ponds everyday. I begin with the HBG pond, and will throw out some feed and gage the fish's response, as to how much I give them. Once I have food on the water, I walk to the other ponds and do the same thing. When I have fed all four, I walk back and check out the HBG pond again. If I still have feed floating on the surface, I'm done. if it's gone, and it usually is, I throw more out and begin the process all over again.

Hand feeding and observation has taught me that my fish will usually feed better with a short interval between two separate feedings, rather than all the feed being thrown at one time. I think it stimulates a competitive response among the fish, which doesn't occur when there's an abundance of feed floating everywhere.

You can learn a lot by watching fish feed from hand fed to feeders.

I just stocked three to seven inch CC and am wondering about how long it usually takes them to start feeding on pellets

If you set a timed feeder, they will find it in almost immediately. My CC found the food in a 3 acre pond within a week.

Also, If I throw more, they really pig out...not sure the 5 minute rule applies. They seem to eat as long as food exists.

I have blue cats as well...they were introduced 3 months after the 3" CC entered so I doubt many were eaten.

That's the same time I introduced 17 Florida LMB .

Agree with Eastland

Don't have an automatic feeder just hand feeding when I am there. Just curious if anyone has experience with the same

Yeah, I do it. I have an auto feeder close to the house. But I hand feed in a 1/4 acre pond at the back and a spring fed creek. Those are about a mile back and I’m not comfortable having a feeder that far from the house. I hand feed at both often. And, they are “wild” fish.

Dave, what's in the creek? Do you use smaller pellets there?

Mostly green sunfish. It originates about 100 yards from my fence line and dumps into a public lake, Amon Carter, about 10 miles downstream. It had fish when I bought the place about 40 years ago. But, I tossed in some BG, cats and LMB. That worked for a long time until we had a 4 year drought that dried up the springs and the creek.

Since then, it has run due to the springs getting refreshed. Not sure how that happens. It taught me that a lot of fish go upstream in a flood. I have, over the years found fish, like gar and a huge cat, that was too big to have been stocked by me or from upstream.

I learned something else there. I stocked some bass minnows along with fatheads and BG as an experiment. I was watching a couple of them that were side by side and about 1.5 inches long. Suddenly, one’s tail was sticking out of the other ones mouth. It swam off so no idea how it digested it or what happened to that little bass.

cb100, CC should not take very long to come to hand-thrown feed, but you can do a couple things to help accelerate the process.

Soak the feed for about 10 minutes before you throw it out. Any fish that then hits that soaked feed will be more likely to stay on it.

For Channel Cats, try to feed in the lower light times. While we do see CC feeding during the day, I've seen them be more active at dusk.

IME feeding at dusk also brings better feeding response from larger BG and YP. Little ones don't seem to mind feeding in direct sunlight, but large adults prefer dusk (or in the shadow of a dock).

Small CC are very secretive, unlike when they get older and will become almost as pets coming in for feed.

I did not see mine for quite a few months. Then I got to noticing if I was very quiet and stayed in one spot without moving I could see a small one dart into the shallow water and snatch a pellet as it was sinking, but not going for the surface for it.

As they get older and less afraid of being eaten they will become more bold, but when they are young and small they avoid the surface and avoid being seen.

One thing I found way back when was that if I mixed some sinking catfish feed (available at my local farm COOP) they would get a lot more aggressive at feeding time. Once they reach some size, then it is no problem as they will learn to come to the surface for the floating feed. Like mobile vacuum cleaners for feed on the surface.

So for the first year I did not see much of my fingerling CC. In my ponds there is structure where they can reproduce and early on my LMB did not do particularly good at recruitment. Subsequently I have had CC recruitment annually up until maybe the last year or two. So now I have tons of CC and if I drive around and feed will be boiling the water with CC feeding. I also have an automatic feeder the same.

They get about a foot long, you will start seeing them lots if hand feeding.