Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding Yellow Perch in-pond feed training

I was successful in feed training my Yellow Perch this year. We lost our LMB a couple years go, and still haven't seen or caught a single bass since. The YLP quickly began getting stacked up in the 6-8" range, and we literally caught hundreds and hundreds one day this winter with 5 guys fishing for a few hours...all of them between 4-8"

So, I needed to get them on feed and on their way to eating size quicker. We bought a Texas Hunter and a submerged LED light. I set it up so lighting turns on at dusk, and feeding begins 30 minutes later. A 1-second burst of 50% sinking commercial feeds (mixture of both 0.8mm crumble fines and 3/32" pellet) was broadcast every 30 minutes for 4 hours. The eight feedings each night totaled approximately 1.5 lbs of feed per night.

This video was taken 7-weeks after starting the feeding regime. These fish had never been exposed to pelleted commercial feeds prior to this. There was an area probably 30ft x 40ft that was nothing but perch feeding at the surface (and 3 ducks).




I will switch them over to a short night feeding time and add in an early morning feeding time, although I haven't decided on a number of feeding and duration for that yet....thinking 3 1-sec bursts both morning and night, all 20min apart.

Just thought I would share.

Creative idea that appears to have worked well for feed training intermediate sized yellow perch.

Well done.

Question on the LED light. How many watts? is it green only?

I found when I ran the LED lights the bugs were attracted then the perch would nip them off the top of the water. The light makes great sense for training.

This is the DockPro 6200 from Fishing Lights Etc. It is 65w, and green only. It plugs into 120v and comes with a 36v outdoor transformer. They do have other 12v light options available in green, white, and both, but solar for charging the battery was pretty high compared to running a leg of 120v to the pond.

I do have to pull the light out and clean it twice a week to keep the aufwuchs and calcium scaling off.


Yellow Perch are what you call positively phototaxic...meaning they are attracted to light at night time. This is probably a feeding characteristic for using the moon to highlight bugs and small fish on the surface and being able to sneak up under them and capture the prey.

This technique certainly has low success rates for the overall number of fish on pellets, but it's a lot less involved than traditional pond/tank/pond feed training. There is also a lot of waste feed on the bottom for several weeks, likely causing some nutrient, water quality, and DO issues (and probably smothering out that section of the soil-water interface)....so use caution and understand what this means to your particular pond if you go this route.

This is true but postitive phototaxic is only true for yellow perch less than 1" long. Older perch are neutral phototaxic to light. I suspect your underwater light attracted zooplankton which attracted small fish, which attracted the perch. Eventually the perch tried tasting some sinking-moving pellets and found them acceptable. Regardless it was a creative way to feed train some larger perch.

I think the light also reinforces the training...Classical conditioning....they learn that green light = food.

I'm sure you are correct on the sequence, and I was really only hoping for some YOY perch to maybe get trained. And knew there was a chance a few larger perch might eat too.

I've pelleted trained all sorts of wild native fish in a big fish tank I used to have. Largemouth, Smallmouth, Gar, darters, Logperch, Bluegill, Longear, Yellow Perch, Greenies, and who knows how many others. The Gar were probably most impressive, they were YOY and would choke down 1/4" pellets 2-3 at a time...the tips of their jaws would be spread as wide as they were long to fit the pellets past their gullet....they'd also be just as happy eating goldfish as they would pellets.