Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Update: Incubating Perch eggs now

Finally got a female to pass some eggs in the holding pond today. This perch didn't like the brush bundles I put in and instead peferred to release her eggs in some grass near shore just under the surface. So instead of moving a brush bundle to the tank, I decided to build a contraption I saw on an online publication to incubate the eggs. The publication is here:

http://southcenters.osu.edu/aqua/fact/perchspawn.pdf

Pieces of the chicken wire are cut and bent upwards to skewer the egg strands on. Unfortunately my first egg strand was small and came apart easily. This is due to the small size of the female. I've been told larger perch spawn earlier and I've observed larger egg strands with the larger perch.

Here is what I built to hold the eggs on to keep flow around them and aerated.



Here is the set up in the tank



And here is a close up of the egg strand fragments.



For those of you that missed my last post the blue tank is left over from another project and I am pumping about 5 gpm of pond water into the tank to keep the eggs aerated. The water flows out the top of the tank down and into the pond. A piece of pantyhose is stretched over the overflow to keep fry in should they hatch successfully (I have my fingers crossed!)

The blue tank




The 5 gpm pump is suspended below these jugs to keep it out of debris and algae.



I will be adding more eggs soon I hope! I would prefer to put the eggs into the pond where I will be growing out the fry but the pond is not ready yet! I was planning on buying fish this year, but that did not pan out so now I am scrambling to get a pond ready to grow my own!

Very nice design, Cecil.

We're going to be gathering some egg masses, too, but not yet! We've still got ice. Forecast is for 70F by Tuesday, so hopefully this long winter will actually end.

Our experiment will be to see if we can kill the perch eggs with various temperature drops. We know that cooler springs lead to lower abundance of yellow perch fry in our natural lakes, but don't know the mechanism. So, we'll try to "slice off" one piece of the research question in these tank studies this spring.

Dave,


Don't get your hopes up too soon. We were that nice recently but expecting some snow tonight!

Not sure how it applies to your locations, but it seems that I always I had best hatch/survival if eggs took at least 10, but no more than 20 days to hatch. Too cold=too long, too warm=too fast. Usually started at 50F or so, held it there for a few days, then started to increase it a bit per day.
Good luck!

Makes sense to me.