Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat new stocking ideas

R&B - As Bruce mentioned HSB will readily eat fish pellets. Almost every HSB that you can buy has been raised on pellets, thus from the time you get them they know what pellets are, where to look for them, and find them.

BUT with SMB and walleye, it is a very different matter.

SMB with the correct technique can be trained to eat pellets but most SMB you buy from hatcheries are not trained to eat pellets. If you want trained SMB you have to hunt or search hatcheries for them or train them yourself. A few midwest-eastern hatcheries have pellet trained SMB.

Walleye that are pellet trained are even more difficult to locate than SMB. They are very rare do to difficulty in training them to accept pellets.

The quickess & easiest way to get your current LMB to eat pellets is to replace them with LMB that are pellet feed trained. If you concur, then I would fish out of your pond the bass that are "least friendly". These fish are the ones that do not follow you around and are "the wildest" or least tame. For overy one of those you take out replace it with a pellet trained bass. The pellet trained bass will help train the friendly bass to convert to pellets. Converting friendly bass to pellets is "doable" especially if you use softened pellets that have been enlarged by forming small balls or wads by compressing several soft pellets together. This softened, flavorful, "wad" or ball then sinks. Bass quickly accept it.

Doesn't your water get too cold for talapia to survive winter?.

You should look into adding golden shiners and some other forage fish. Allow the shiners to establish and get 6"-8" before adding predators. HSB, SMB and walleye are all fish predators and you will need either quite a large forage base/supply to feed all these predators, or very few predators and their resultant offspring to keep all adequately growing. Keep in mind that there should be 6 to 10 pounds of forage fish ALWAYS present for every predator. Some of the SMB and HSB will go "off feed" and about 50% to 75% of the SMB offspring will NOT learn to eat pellets.

If you allow adequate weed cover to establish and maintain it, this may provide enough cover for long term survival of forage fish.