Polobbie,

They are toying with you on account of your aversion to feeding. You are going to have sunlight falling on your pond ... right? Well if yes, your ponds will grow food for your fish. You don't have feed them forage ... the pond can do that for you. Your thoughts are about a HSB predator and Hybrid sunfish. This experiment has been running a while in several member ponds and the results have been mixed. In particular, the jury is out on whether HSB control the population of even hybrid sunfish.

Based on your stated goals which I summarize as "I want catchable fish that are enjoyable to catch ... I will harvest a few but don't want the success of their growth to depend on active population management." .... I will offer a few thoughts.

HSB are an interesting fish for this purpose. The first thing I will tell you is that they can serve as a dual purpose fish. Smaller HSB are much like pan-fish really and the larger ones are predators. At smaller sizes they are suited for a pond like yours but might not fare well after they exceed 20" in length ... especially in Texas. All the same, a 16" HSB is indeed enjoyable to catch and fine eating too. The extreme advantage to a put and take predator like HSB is that ALMOST ALL of the standing weight can be memorable to catch. In an LMB/BG combination this is usually not the case (though it can be). Take a look at the 4 year rotation below for a 1/4 acre pond:

[Linked Image]

I assumed your pond could support up to 250 lbs/acre of HSB. So how will the HSB be supported? By a combination of insects, small invertebrates, and small fish. You know I catch 16" LMB frequently on little baits and I have caught > 10 lbs trout that got that big on little bitty shrimp like creatures. The idea is to keep the feed chain SHORT. So can GAMs, Red Shiner, and PK shrimp support 250 lbs of HSB? Well alternatively ... if they can support 250 lbs of BG ... what prevents them from supporting a similar weight of HSB? That question is not rhetorical. Everyone is invited to take a stab at the question and offer the devil's advocation as to why 16 to 80 HSB wouldn't make a living on these highly reproductive creature.

IMHO that number of mouths just isn't enough HSB to completely extirpate the prey organisms. Sure Swingle found that 170 lbs of LMB could extirpate GAMs ... but hey that was because there were hundreds of LMB offspring consuming the GAMs. As long as the largest HSB aren't having to consume prey that are eating the largest of the GAMS, RSH, and PKS then the food chain is short and the prey DIRECTLY feeds the fish you are growing to catch. Provided you don't have in mind to catch monster HSB ... Such a food chain could easily support HSB up to around 18" in length with NO NEED for food chain interlopers (like reproducing lepomis or lepomis hybrids). These will not grow as large or as fast as HSB any way. Why do you need them?

The scenario calls for a stocking of 80 8" HSB in a 1/4 acre pond every 4 years and a harvest of (up to but no more than) 16 HSB every year. By year 4, if the harvest has been implemented, the standing weight should be declining justifying a new infusion of stockers. It is unlikely at the stocking rates (and existing prey lengths) that any of the original stockers would be large enough to consume the laddered stockers (8 inches in length). So this kind of system seems almost ideal for your stated goals.

With regard to feeding, I would just say if done in moderation in the early going it is a very cost efficient way to grow fish and increase the nutrients in your water. As long as the additional nutrients are not creating other problems (excessive vegetative growth), I would want to use feed as a means of adding nutrients.
Attached Images