Pond Boss
I spoke with Steve Fender of Fender’s Fish Hatchery today. I am interested in the experience others have had with the percentage of YP offspring adaptation to pellet feeding. I know Bill Cody recommends them as a supplier of pellet trained YP. Comments or experiences with any supplier is much appreciated!
Thanks!
Heppy
Not even close to a perch master here but I have been working with Feed training YP this year and I will say I feel it was successful in many ways. First, my training was following all of Bill's advice on how to feed train. I started with 150 perch in 2 cages and fairly quickly condensed my training to one cage with about 85 fish.
I found after release at 20 days it took about a week for things to pick back up. One thing I noticed was the feed trained perch were escorting other perch of differing sizes to feed, so I have to say I strongly believe they learn (Or "can" learn) from others rather quickly-in my experience-which is not enough experience to say that this is normal or maybe not so normal.
I'm sorry I don't know of any suppliers of feed trained YP, but thought I'd share what I have observed from following Bill's training advice.
I think and my experience says that the percent of YP offspring that resorts to eating pellets is strongly associated to how many generations of YP parents had been eating pellets. So it depends. With each subsequent generation of YP more numbers of the offspring will learn to eat pellets. Long term YP growers say the more domesticated the YP become the easier it is to get the next crop of YP on feed.

Fenders never used to sell pellet trained YP. Now some but not all of their retail YP are sourced from domesticated pellet trained YP.
Thanks Snipe and Bill Cody!
Bill,
I saw where you had listed them in previous posts. Who would you recommend as a source of 4-6” and 6-8” pellet trained yellow perch for my spring fed Virginia ponds this late fall? Single (5gal/minute, 60.4 degree now) spring (3’ from full, 5-8’ deep) about 12” above discharge pipe feeding the .15 acre pond. There are 2 headwater springs and a small spring fed stream (72 degrees now, year round) that will fill the 2.7 acre main body of water(valve not closed yet). I’m guessing total water running out the 10” construction drain is about 30-40 gal/minute now. The smaller pond receives approximately 4 hours of partial/direct sunlight and 2/3 of the larger pond will be in full sun for most of the day. The big pond varies from 4-10’ deep. I wanted to give you this information for you to base your feedback.
Thanks!
Heppy
Check with SteveFender to verify if his perch this fall will be pellet trained; if yes use him. The strain of his YP with optimum food can get to 14"-16".
Bill Cody,
When I first spoke with Steve that was the first question I asked. He said yes they are being fed Optimal Jr. I also learned today that pellet trained YP will feed better if your SMB are not pellet trained. Never thought about that before but it does make sense to me. Being that YP are the prey and SMB are the predator, not sure I would want to have dinner at the same time/location as a serial killer.
Thanks,
Heppy
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