I’ve been feeding BSF larvae to my redear sunfish (shellcrackers) everyday for about a week and they are taking them with enthusiasm. They have a preference for the immature larvae over the dark prepupal larvae, but they still eat the dark ones pretty well. I think the prepupal larvae might be more foreign to them than the light colored larvae, but I think with some conditioning they will eventually accept them just as well. There are some individual fish that already take the prepupae well which is why I suspect it isn’t a taste issue or something like that.
(Wow. That video quality is terrible. I’m open to suggestions if anyone would like to offer some advice about uploading video. I’ll leave this up for now, but I have to do something! I tried blip.tv and PhotoBucket which were better quality, but the embedded players for these sites ruined the xhtml validation for my blog, the YouTube videos don’t.)
Here’s a link to a better quality version of the same video at Blip.tv - VIDEO
Update - August 14
These fish are in a pond that was built in January 2008 and I only stocked 24 adult redears. (I also stocked 110 very small redears in late March and you can see a few of them feeding with the larger fish in the video) At first when I began feeding them BSF larvae the fish were concentrated in one area of the pond because they were on spawning beds. This made it very convenient to hand feed them, but I assumed they would disperse once the spawning season passed. Well, the spawning seems to be over and they’re still concentrated in the same spot, and I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the daily offerings of black soldier fly larvae. Lately when I walk up to the feeding area I see the fish lining up just off the bank of the pond about one meter from the water’s edge. All fish are oriented on me as they wait for the rain of tender BSF morsels. They will swim into water that is only a few inches deep to snatch up the larvae. Previously I was unaware of the popularity of fly larvae as fish bait, but now I can understand why they are so effective.
If you’re a sensative person you may hesitate at the idea of sacrificing the larvae to fish this way but there is another way to look at it. In nature fly larvae have a high mortality rate and the balance of the population is based on the vast majority of them not surviving to reproduce. Two BSF can produce between 500 and 900 eggs depending on which report you read, and to maintain the normal population only 2 of those several hundred will survive to lay more eggs. I address this issue in more detail here: Feeding black soldier fly larvae to other animals
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