Added to what John said, the HSB are eating a lot of welfare pellets and not solely surviving on a diet of small fish. In my experience as the HBG generations age the numbers of females increase thus contributing to more small HBG type sunfish.
If you reduce the amount of pellets the growth will slow for all pellet eating fish. You are sort of caught in to feed or not to feed pellets. IMO which matches others add some 10"-13" LMB which will likely eat primarily fish. Numbers of LB to add will depend on how many small HBG you have, how fast you want to reduce their numbers, and how many small HBG you can yourself remove. When fishing with just a small hook worm and bobber, I can usually easily remove 20-30 BG per hour - one per every couple minutes. I can also catch quite a few small sunfish daily with larger sized fish traps. Smaller sunfish types can be significantly injured and/or fins trimmed and tossed back into the pond as easy prey for HSB and LMB. I have also used these small sunfish to feed HSB and LMB living in a cage.
Plan for each LMB to eat at least 100-200 small fish per year likely more - depending. Remember you will get another HBG spawn this year and each future year. When the LMB are reproducing, you can put a heavy focus on removing their numbers.
Please keep us updated to your progress so other can learn.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 04/09/18 09:20 AM.
