Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations LM Bass Question

DJ - welcome to our fish raising forum. Since you are an angler of bass tournaments and an experienced angler, now you will get an education on how bass behave in a small pond. I don't think your angling skills are the problem; at least so far.

It sounds like after you initially caught these bass for stocking into your pond, you also fished for them numerous times, and now you can only catch the occassional bass. This is your first lesson in LMbass behavior; they learn quick (Lusk calls this conditioning). Either way the results are the same; hook smart fish. If you want the initial group of stocked bass to be very catchable, don't do what you did. As Theo mentioned, your first year class of bass from your initial stocked fish will be quite vulnerable to angling.

Those initial 50 LMB have been exposed to negative reinforcement of angling several times THIS summer. They do not like results of angling and frequent angling gets them conditioned to be more cautious. The amount of conditioning required to teach them to avoid lures varies among individual fish; natural variability dictates that some are smarter than others. Smartest ones learn from watching others get removed. Some bite once some twice. Dumbest ones will repetitively bite; Others are in-between.

If you put a treble hook in a big chunk of hot dog and then hooked and drug your dog around by the lips how fast do you think he would stop eating your offerings of hot dogs? I and others have learned that fish are not a whole lot different than the hooked dog example. You are now also in the early stages of learning this lesson. For more information on this topic read two back issues of Pond Boss Magazine: Lusk's & Mann's good article on Smart Bass Mar-Apr 2005, and Willis' and Cody's article on LMB angling to monitor LMB and how angling affects their catchability. Both are very good articles for someone in your situation about fish learning and catchability - read them.

Your bass will need a rest from fishing pressure before some of them resume bitting lures/baits. Always using new styles of baits helps catch success rates. Although eventually the bass will learn to look for a line or some hardware attached to "food" or humans with "sticks"; both strong negative reinforcements to them. Since fish can see you before you see them due to how light bends as it enters the water fish quickly know when someone approaches their enviornment. This character helps them avoid land based predators including anglers.

There has been discussion here previously about fish food quality and using other foods such as dog food to feed your fish. A search in past posts will reveal those discussions.

Look at the protein content of your dog food and make a mental note of it. Average fish food for omnivours (BG, Catfish, Tilapia) contains 32% protein; some as low as 28%. Very rarely will bass eat this 28%-32% food unless they are very hungry. Lower protein foods have very litle if any fish meal or flavor enhancers in it. Only if very lucky, you will you usually get a couple to several bass to eat this 32% protein food. Carnivore fish need fish food with proten content 40% or greater. If pellet bass are raised on high protein food, very few of them will adapt to eating lower protein foods. Most will go off pelleted food if natural foods are common in their pond. Most fish hatcheries that are raising bass on pelleted food for production use 45%-50% protein pellets. Getting non-pellet raised older bass (10"+) to eat fish food is a real challenge where many fail to succeed. I am not surprised your bass ignore dog food. They will eat hot dogs and raw meat quicker than dog food.