Bottom line? It may be possible (though not yet observed for LMB) that some genotypic females develop into phenotypic males under natural conditions.
jpsdad, this is exactly what happened and is happening in Colorado with WAE. They have abandoned the program because of this which leads back to doing it the old fashioned way to get a 100% female only situation. The input to this-if you do it right-is tremendous because you need to pull shooters from at least 3 generations and sex female shooters from the 4th to get the best potential genetic.
I guess where I'm going with this is that is is possible to sex and provide females with intent to have trophy potential but are the customers really getting that potential if the grower sexes the first year class? No.
It's going to take a grower that is willing to work this program for 4-5 years to build the gene pool and then sell stock sexed from there. At that point, your best males and females each need to be held back for reproduction going fwd.
With that said, I'm going to say 100$ a fish is not enough if you really want to supply true trophy potential, and if someone is offering female only for 35$ a fish, I'd run hard and fast.
