You will certainly increase the survival rate by pre conditioning the fingerlings before releasing. Releasing fingerlings into a pond full of predators will mostly result in an expensive snack.

For a pond with established predators I would completely forgo the FHM all together. Spend your thousand dollars on advanced size BG and RES. In your situation I would much rather stock a half dozen 6" BG or RES for every hundred of the fingerlings you were going to stock. Large stocking fish are expensive, but cheap compared to 2-3" fish that get slaughtered in the first couple days.

Stock advanced sizes of forage fish and remove lots of small LMB if you have an over abundance. That would be the way I would do it but I am no professional so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.


John

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