I've been thinking hard about sinking feed lately, mostly due to the greedy birds that dine on fish pellets at my place. Geese aren't nearly as happy with sinking pellets, and some fish are more eager to hit stuff that doesn't force them to the surface. More fish food ends up in the fish, which is big considering how expensive the stuff is these days!

One thing I hadn't considered is how sinking pellets might also change the game with respect to redears and maybe crappie. Neither rise to the surface to feed, so normally it's very tough to supplement their diet. But what if most of the feed sank? What if more of it got to the bottom? Could some be extruded to more closely resemble what redear normally eat? Could those pellets be extruded to sink more rapidly to get down to the redears without being totally gobbled by CNBG and LMB?

Dustin at Optimal is working on these questions, though hampered by the weird economic conditions. Purina MVP is about 20 percent sinking already, wonder if they could do some runs where it is 80 percent & see what happens?

I absolutely LOVE to watch fish come to the surface to feed. Plus, floating pellets allow us to better track fish moods. But maybe we should give more thought to the advantages of sinking pellets.

Purina MVP is a combination of various sizes and floating and sinking pellets.

Right you are, Yak. About 80% floating, 20% sinking. But too much of the floating ends up inside a bird for my taste. I'd like to try maybe 20% floating, 80% sinking, or even 100 percent sinking that can be mixed with some floating. I am very interested in the prospect of feeding fish we normally can;t, such as redear and crappie.

Speaking of redear, fast sinking pellets would be denser, with few air bubbles inside them. I wonder how that would affect their trajectories when being thrown from the feeder. If they go further out, that could be a plus.

Anthropic great thread and glad you started it. I believe Dustin is working hard right now on this project. A few other theoretical advantages of sinking feed........... 1) Fish feed has traditionally had carbs mixed with it to provide the desired 'floating pellet' quality that many pondmeisters desire. While these pellets do make fish grow faster, theoretically the fish don't live as long due to damage from carb intake. Essentially (I don't mean to state this as fact, but it is a strong opinion of mine) your fish grow just as large without pellets (or nearly), but it takes more time. With sinking feed the carbs can be decreased, and with it removing the negative impact the carbs have on your fish. The potential to improve the quality of fish feed increases dramatically without the need for carbs in the feed 2) Most fish tend to only feed on floating pellets best during low light conditions. In my experience this doesn't hold quite as true for sinking feeds. In theory this extends the time in a day you can feed your fish. Mine even take well to sinking pellets around my green light when it is completely dark out. And 3) my experience has been that once water temps drop below 55 surface feeding slows tremedously, if not stopping completely. The little I've played with homemade hydrated feed this has not been the case at all. I've had fish feeding on homemade pellets in 40-45 degree water. Hopefully this means a pondmeister could extend his fish feeding an extra month or so in the spring and fall, and possibly feed all winter in the south. In fact, I hope to keep a small spot ice free this winter in my pond and drop sinking pellets off of a belt feeder through the winter months and see what type of response I get.

I hope the experts chime in on this as in my mind incorporating sinking feed into the pond management protocol could be a game changer.

My observations of pellet training RES can be found here:
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=508098#Post508098

I rarely see a RES rise for a floating pellet. It happens every now and then, but not often.

I've not seen any of my YP come to the top for pellets.

I think you're onto something with this line of thinking.

NEDOC, a quick observation, and by no means definative: this past winter I kept a few YP, BG, GSF, and goldfish in an aquarium in our partially heated garage. When I allowed the water temp to drop to 50 degrees, the sunfish would not feed; the YP would take earthworms. The goldfish continued to ravenously gobble pellets, meal worms, and earthworms.

While goldfish are not carp, it could be that feeding in your pond when water temps are lower than the 50s would mainly benefit your carp. Not good, eh? You might be able to use this to your advantage however, to lure the carp to a spot in the pond where they could be efficiently netted.

Just a thought.

Wow, great job remembering my carp dilemma. But that problem got fixed, or is in the process of getting fixed!! My pond had a drain tube in it that had been silted shut for decades. The natural resource district is responsible for taking care of my dam since it is a flood control structure. Well they had taken the valve off of the drain tube several months or years back. Over time silt worked its way through the tube and it blew open! So over the last month my pond has drained. I have a few pools with a few inches of water in it that I need to poison or work on drying out. But I'm starting over and I'm carp free!!

What about the feed that drops into what may be un useable water due to low or no DO for those of us that don't turn the entire pond? My opinion here but I feel like the 20% sink is for a reason. I understand some fish are surface shy, but I also think there's a lot more to this than meets the eye here.

Good observation, Snipe. Low DO is associated with summer temps, so this is most likely to be an issue then. Late summer especially. It might be smart to observe the thermocline at that point and point the feeders so that pellets don't go deeper.

Excellent post, NEDOC. Your creativity & willingness to push the limits is appreciated. Thanks!

If fish grow faster, then this should improve growth even for those that are not eating pellets. Competition for best spawning sites will increase, forcing smaller BG to spend more energy getting big rather than reproducing.

My experience feed training RES is that once feed hits the bottom most of it will go uneaten. A very slow sinking feed would be better, movement seems to be a feeding trigger and once it hits the bottom and is no longer moving it normally doesn't get eaten. Last time I feed trained RES I had 4 or 5 RES that would pick pellets off the bottom of the tank, the other 80 of so RES just ignored the motionless feed on the bottom.

Interesting. I'd thought that maybe the RES would be more enthused about motionless stuff at the bottom, as it kinda resembles snails or mussles. Apparently not!

Once RES are feed trained they will readily take pellets off the surface but they do prefer low light levels.

Snails and mussels do move, often very slowly and not very far, I have watched RES stare at snails in my aquarium.

Wow, this thread is full of great comments.

Also, its great to hear that NEDOC has solved the carp problem for good.

I had a smaller number of RES in an aquarium but basically observed the same thing as Shorty. Once the feed hit the bottom they lost interest.

I would go out and get snails out of the pond and put in for them to eat. When a snail moved the RES would race over to it, hover above it at a 45 degree angle staring at the snail, but would not attack/eat it unless it was moving. If the snail sat still long enough the fish would lose interest and go away. I never knew if it was just not hungry or if it needed the snail to move before it ate it. Many of the snails were too big for the small RES to eat also so that could have been an issue. Sometimes they would bite at the exposed meat part of the snail before moving on.

I did this when I bought some RES to stock my forage pond. I just brought a few inside to watch them for a few weeks.

The last time I set out my minnow trap and baited it with MVP I waited for a short time and when I brought it up I had 5 one inch or inch and a half RES in the trap. I was surprised to see the RES. Not sure but I am guessing they came to the feed that lay on the bottom of the trap.

Sinking feed observation.......... here in the midwest we've had a little blast of cold weather. Water temps dropped 6-10 degrees over several days. ALL surface feeding stopped. Feeding on sinking pellets slowed somewhat, but not completely. They still fed on the sinking feed, but not as aggressively as they had been.

I have used a piece of tin (roof type) suspended about a foot off the bottom in 4 ft of water to feed sinking pellets over. RES would eat off the tin but not all the pellets were eaten. You have to get the solids off of the tin every once in a while for it to continue working. Some of those RES would feed train to eat at the surface.

Any experience with other species regarding both eating sinking pellets in general and sinking pellets that had made it to the bottom?

I wonder if prawns, PK shrimp, catfish, or crappie would take it off the bottom.

In these cases there were some BG that would eat off the tin. Only other species present were TShad and HSB. I suspect that TShad would eat some pellet debris - not off the tin but generally. I did not see the HSB do so but this was in shallow water where HSB did not frequent. This was a small 1 feeder experience for a summer.

I never see my HSB near the top except when the feeders go off. No other fish, even the big LMB and RBK, explode on the pellets like they do!

What kind of birds? I’ve never had that problem.

Mostly geese. Wood ducks to a lesser extent