A place of their own or some really good cover to hide in.

 

FHM need plenty of structure to evade the predators and serve as spawning habitat. In ponds, the aquaculture industry uses floating pallets and the FHM deposit their eggs on the underside of them. It can be hard to get a breeding population in a pond simply because most species of fish gobble them up. Although feeding FHM to your bass will add weight (if you feed enough), it tends to be an expensive way to go. It takes 10lbs of live forage to add 1 lb of weight to a bass; 7 lbs of that is used for just maintenance. You should be looking at the balance of bluegills and bass to promote a healthy population of each. Then when you stock 6-7 lbs of FHM they tend to be "extra" food used for growth instead of "essential" food used for maintenance.

 

my ponds 30yrs old . and I did this when it was new ,made a maize of twiggs in bundles pretty tight together in a couple of the shore area;s kept throwiing tree limb;s and stuff in that area over the yrs ,that way they have a hiding place from the bass , theres always a school of bass cruiseing that area ,and theres lots a minnies there , gotta keep it tight or the bass will find them.

 

They can spawn. But boy they need cover and lots of it. We used to stock thousands of them in our pond and you could jsut see big Catfish and giant Largies following them as the Fatheads swam away from them. So after about a week of that the Fatheads were gone and the Bass/Catfish we fat as heck. We like putting goldens in their because they know how to stay in structure and not get eatin.