Hi Rainman,

I know that no disrespect was intended and I am here to learn and give observations that I find seemingly to be right but could absolutely be wrong. I have a inquiry out to a group in Israeli to an Israeli Carp club to see what kind of experiences and information they have, but their Israeli Carp do not look like what I had. So I will let you know what I hear back from them.

As you know Zetts was my guru in pond thinking since ponds were his lively hood without using chemicals for raising fish for sale. He stated that KOI were only part of the FA control and said Israeli carp and KOI eat different kinds of algae. Then he also had CC, sometimes White suckers, clams, crawfish, snails & plants. It is interesting to me about Tapia in the KOI ponds. Could the Tapia be an additional algae eater like I believe the Israeli are also along with the KOI. If I could experiment I would have a pond with no KOI, a pond next to it with KOI and see what the difference was in the FA. I can not argue that your KOI clients have FA in their ponds. That is what you do. I also have walked the edges of my pond many time and seen the KOI sucking on the trace FA.

I don't have any pictures of my bass but here is what I know. Towards the end when my fish were winter killed I had fewer bass and blue gill. The bluegill were fair sized but the bass were smaller and in the two pound range when they died and floated to the surface of the pond. I don't know the answer to this. But what I did have, and I know this sounds like fantasy for a 1 acre pond, were big CC, KOI, IC and huge GC. I attribute this to the plants and FA food and the recycled poo that kept this cycle going. I have one GC that I have see several time that survived the kill. It looks to be over 2 feet but I had many over three feet. What I suspect was happening with the bass is that the older bigger bass had died out and most of the young bass along with almost all minnows were being eaten by the big fish. I had very few minnows left. Zetts did say that he saw GC eating his bass fry and after that he got rid of all GC.

I have relatives in Rockport, TX that have a KOI pond and big homemade pond filter that impressed me.