anthropic,
Some of my questions were from specifically thinking about your pond!
You seem to be doing things right, but haven't reached your goals for trophy bass. I am hoping you just haven't reached your trophy goals yet.
If it is possible to hand feed a LMB to put on 5# in a few months, then clearly we are not even getting close to maximum LMB weight gain - especially since moving from a tank environment to a highly-managed pond should not be too big of a change.
(Crazy thought - Perhaps the LMB in ponds ARE eating until satiation. The LMB in the tank was just frustrated to have a RBT buzzing around her tank, so she utilized her only solution and ate the offending RBT?)
