Originally Posted By: saint_abyssal
Originally Posted By: teehjaeh57
underweight FHC.

Believe it or not, this is kind of something I was planning the pond around. To be more specific about the intended food web, I wanted to stock a large variety of small forage fish like Gambusia, banded killifish, non-golden shiners, non-fathead minnows, pumpkinseed, alongside the BCP and FHC.

I was hoping the flatheads would kind of struggle after they outgrew those foods. Their only food source beyond this would be the crappie themselves, I was hoping this would create a bottle neck where few flatheads achieved large size, and those that did could control the smaller ones through cannibalism. Meanwhile, the heavily predated, well-fed crappies could max out their size.

I'm a complete amateur though, so that might still be a path to both species ending up stunted. Just thought I would elaborate on the specifics I was imagining. Would being underweight ruin the quality of an FHC as a food fish?


Saint,

Flatheads can control crappie, however, the result probably won't be what you desire above. Flatheads are rather aggressive and sometimes kill each other. Seems to me it would be exceedingly difficult to manage the appropriate sizes and numbers to get the desired result.

Pat's having good success so look into what he is doing.


It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so - Will Rogers