Tracy I recall an old old research paper where they raised hybrid fish by using parental pairs. This was back in the day that farm pond fish were more looked at as a food supply rather than recreation fishing.
One of the tests they used I believe used male RES and female BG. I could be backwards on that. They put something like 5 males and 3 females in the pond. Pretty sure ewest posted the study so maybe he knows which it is and can post it again.
The pairs made lots of hybrid offspring. The offspring were mostly male. They were measuring standing crop for food production, but it might work for forage production also.
Would something like that work as a forage system? Keep just a few adults in the forage pond to create annual forage.
One thing I recall is that adding more pairs did not increase the number of recruits because of the additional pressure on the fry from the additional adults. It took only a few pairs to populate the pond to carrying capacity.
I recently put a single CNBG male in my SMB/RES pond to create some limited CNBG/RES hybrids in that pond to up the catch rate of sunfish.
Last edited by snrub; 05/17/20 02:50 PM.
