All the fish in my pond are from a friends group of farm ponds. Bluegill and Large mouth bass. They were planted a couple of years ago and now there many decent size fish of both species. And many small of both.
I bought a big bag of food that has the different size pellets from BB to OO buckshot size. All the fish of any size completely ignore it.
Will they ever learn to eat it? Keep trying?
If I bought some hatchery hybrid bluegill would the others learn from them? Thanks.
jim
Most folks try to feed at the same time everyday for a few weeks to get them started on the feed. LMB may not feed at all, but the BG should pick it up eventually. IIRC, my feed trained hatchery hybrid bluegill took 3 weeks to start feeding. I fed within the same hour every evening by hand and only threw a small handful in per day until they caught on...then only fed what they would clean up in 20-30 minutes. Some folks will say only feed what the will clean up in 10 minutes, but my fish have never fed very fast. I used to take 30 minutes to finish off 4 handfuls of feed (not thrown all at once either).
Adding feed trained fish should help, but would not be necessary. Once just one of the BG start making a splash, the others will fall in pretty fast.
When I first started feeding many years ago, I would see no response from the few BG, GSF, YP, BCP, and LMB. I stocked about 15 rainbow and brown trout from a hatchery. The trout took to the Aquamax 600 immediately.
Winter came and went. The trout came back to the dinner table after ice out, feeding on Skretting feed. Some time mid summer a few sunfish and a perch or two tried a few pellets. Soon after that I stocked more GSF; the next summer I planted 25 adult BG.
About that time I switched to Optimal BG and dried mealworms. Feeding is a frenzied operation. The tiger trout porpoise through the scads of feeding panfish. An occasional largemouth juvenile will grad a bite. I've even seen emaciated crappie sample a pellet or two. Seems like the BCP would rather stunt or starve to death than eat fish food, even with hundreds of other mouths sucking in the goods.
My recommendation is to moisten some feed in a plastic bag and try that. Also crush some pellets into bits. The fines will attract smaller fish; the crushed pellets will disperse and attract more fish by their smell. Give them time. They'll catch on. I've got 4 fingerling bass in my aquarium that slash pellets as they fall from my hand towards the water surface. They learned that from my tanked BG and GSF.
I just got some lake fish trained a few months ago - I started out by throwing out crickets/ grasshoppers / worms from the yard first until they would gather there for me and then I used the trick of pre-wetting the pellets. The whole process took a few weeks, but once a few pick it up - the others fall in line pretty quickly. I did change my food about 2-3 weeks ago and they were slow to get restarted after the change (so I would suggest to start with the food you plan to keep using). They are now back to their normal feeding frenzies.