Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Evaluating New Pond and New Fish

[quote] I am curious on the TP. Almost everybody I see online that sells brood fish sells them in 3-5 female with 1-2 male. Why is the 50:50 mix important?/quote]

I incorrectly assumed that tilapia commonly available to many pond owners were mainly males raised by food fish and not raised primarily for pond stocking. Pond stockers will often buy TP from food fish growers who use mainly fast growing individuals. Those TP are mostly all male TP.
I think TP need to be mature to determine gender. Maybe not. I am not a TP expert. I am not sure how efficiently male vs female TP are sexed by regular pond TP stockers. TP are fairly difficult to correctly determine the gender. One has to be well experienced to rapidly and quickly determine gender on lots of TP. I basically separate male and female TP mainly by size group and color of mature males. Males grow faster than females thus when a batch of 7 month old mixed TP sizes are present for TP 3"-8" long, I consider smaller ones females and larger ones males.

Thus it was my opinion that buying a 50:50 TP group mix would be the best way to insure plenty of females to provide lots of YOY TP that are best for eating the small forms of attached algae for control and YOY will also serve as forage fish. I was told maybe incorrectly that YOY TP are crafty and soon learn to be pretty good at escaping predation and thus YOY TP are not well eaten by predators during the heat of summer thus the YOY were not considered an ideal forage fish until the TP were sluggish and dying due to cold water 48F-55F conditions. TP death temperature due to cold water depends on variety /specie of TP. .