Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Help Dead Bream, Aerator and Water Chemistry

To my eye and ltd experience brain, the small fingerling looks stunted. That eye is HUGE wrt the body size; in fact the whole head looks oversized for the body.

Bruce, I cannot see an edge to the opercule, but that does not rule it out it's presence (right now I'm looking at it from work on a monitor with a serious electron beam convergence problem). If it is only about an inch long, it is small in my experience to have the opercule dark already unless it is old for it's size and therefore stunted (based on currently one year of watching small BG/RES fingerlings in a watering trough/small aquarium).

Could the "spawn" that this is representative of be less agressive/successful stockers that have failed to thrive?

L&L, please forgive the shear speculation (from myself and others), but our ulterior motive for trying to help out is wanting to learn more ourselves.