If you want them to really take off buy some fish food (catfish food or multi spcies 32% protein stuff is fine for FHM) and toss out about a cup or two cups each day.

Kind of fun watching them push the pellets around the pond. Where your pond is only partially full it may not be very fertile yet. The fish food will make sure they have something to eat and kick start the food chain process in the pond by adding fertility.

Don't worry about the pellets being too big. They will push them around the pond till they soften up and they can consume them. If they sink to the bottom the FHM will find them there.

I did experiments with snorkel and also scuba more than once and anywhere in the pond you go, as long as it is above the thermocline, the FHM would find me and be pecking all over my exposed body. Pulling at my arm and leg hairs. They will find feed anywhere you put it as long as there are not other predators in the pond that force them into cover. I dropped piles of feed on the bottom (sinking catfish food) and watched with an underwater camera. Within a minute or two a FHM school would find the pile and devour it. Two feet deep or seven feet deep, did't matter. They would find it in short order.

Once you get predators in the pond the FHM will be forced to find cover or stay around the shallows or get eaten. But early on, they will be all over that pond.

When you see them cleaning up that amount of feed you could increase it over time. Being well fed will help them have bigger spawns.

Last edited by snrub; 06/27/18 04:00 PM.
John

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