I just saw it here and now cant find it even with the search.
How many pounds of food does it take for a fish to gain a pound? Is this pellets? What about pounds of baby blue gill and minnows for LMB?
Thanks!
jim
Jim,
The easiest 1 pound to gain is the first pound. Most studies deal with young fish and relatively small fish. A five pound bass will not gain 1 lb on 2 lbs of feed (assuming here that is all it has to eat). The reason is that there is such a thing called maintenance. The 5 pound bass probably needs in the neighborhood of 7 lbs of feed annually to gain 1 lb (again assuming that is all it has to eat).
The bigger a fish gets, the worse the FCR is. For catfish, when they weigh about 1 lb the instantaneous FCR is about 2 lbs feed to 1 lb gain. What this means is that if you had pond full of 1 lb catfish and feed them 30 lbs today ... you would have 15 lbs more catfish tomorrow in the aggregate. To get the best FCR, you have to feed them fast. That is, maintenance must be small so that the feed is mostly converted to gain.
At rates most people supplemental feed, say 1 lb/acre-day, one is NOT feeding fast and the feed does not convert at 2 to 1 UNLESS the fish are fairly young and there is a lot of natural forage providing what they need for maintenance.