Another way to get fish to better stay "on feed" is to buy larger fish that have been feed trained. This is often easier said than done because pellet raised fish are often sold quickly by hatcheries and finding larger fish that are pellet trained for long periods can be quite difficult.
On this topic, it also helps fish to stay "on feed" by having a low amount of natural foods available in the pond. Pellet raised fish that have a hard time locating natural foods will soon realize that the welfare pellet foods are much easier to obtain. Of course this is counter productive because a low amount of natural food items in a pond suppresses growth of the remaining fish or non pellet eating fish. In the many ponds where the fish have low relative weights (RW = body wt/standard wt) as in thin bodied, the pond already has either too low amounts of natural foods or too many fish present eating what natural food items that are being produced (usually both). Thus in these situations fish stocked as pellet eating fish, will usually remain on the fish pellet welfare system. But remember that when small, expensive, pellet raised fish are stocked into an existing pond with regular adults, the newly stocked fish are very often just food items for the bigger fish. It would have been cheaper but probably not any wiser to stock fathead minnows. IMO the better management plan would to be to remove some of the too abundant thin bodied fish.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 08/02/08 01:50 PM.
