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I wonder if the last thing a fhm hears before being eaten is Morrison singing the end. Great song. All bruces fish need is a lava lamp and a little wacky tabbaci and they'll be hungry in no time



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Bruce, the four 3" RES I have in our aquarium love TetraBetta food. It is 43% protein and has fish meal and shrimp meal as part of the ingredients. Realizing buying it in 1oz containers of feed at WalMart is not going to make your wife happy with the cost side of the ledger, I do not know if one of the commercial feed makers make something similar in suitable size bags at a reasonable price for your purposes.

They also take floating 32% generic catfish pellets crushed up with pliers but they sure do not like it as well as tiny Tetra pellets.

I trapped some FHM out of the pond and put in with the RES and they seem to keep the feed in the bottom of the tank that the RES missed cleaned up. It had become a problem before starting to feed the Tetra food. Your FHM's could serve a dual purpose if you could put a bunch of medium sized ones in. Clean up the missed feed to help with the water quality and become a snack to the RES as they got big enough to consume them. Just an idea from someone who has zero experience with what you are doing.

What my RES really love is when my wife and I put on the boots, wade a few inches out in the pond that we have the edge lined with 2-3" rocks, turn some rocks over and bring them some tasty snails (under fallen leaves is a good place to look too). They start out will the small ones and work their way up in size till they cant get them in their mouth or can't crush them and will spit them back out. The big snails lay eggs and then when the snail eggs start looking like they are growing and turning colors, they mysteriously disappear.

Let's see. For you to feed your amount of fish snails..........looks like you should set aside lots of time for feeding fish. :-)


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Originally Posted By: snrub
Bruce, the four 3" RES I have in our aquarium love TetraBetta food. It is 43% protein and has fish meal and shrimp meal as part of the ingredients. Realizing buying it in 1oz containers of feed at WalMart is not going to make your wife happy with the cost side of the ledger...


Great post! What does one ounce cost? I wonder if it's available in 8 or 16 ounce quantities on the internet. Hmm.

Remember that dry food converts to about 6:1 in wet or frozen weight. Meaning I would have to compare 1 ounce cost for flakes vs. 8 ounce cost for frozen bloodworms. The converstion might not be as bad as you'd think.


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Bruce,

O.K stupid question: what are your goals with putting the redear in the tanks? And forgive if that's been covered and I missed it.

Feed training? Growth over winter and feed training is not the primary goal? Seems if it's the former, feeding live or expensive frozen feeds is counterproductive. Or perhaps you are working toward training on artificial feed by feeding the live feed, then frozen, then freezedried, then pellets?

???


If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.






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The goal is to get these fish big enough to release in the Quarry as soon as possible. I've got a few five to seven pound bass in the quarry that would love to make these redears into a snack. The quarry, evidently because of the limestone induced water chemistry, is a haven for snails. I'd like to maintain a decent population of redears to keep the snails in check. The redears stocked over the last three years have thrived and grown into beautiful 1+ pound specimens. Interestingly, I've never seen a single redear come up to pellets in my lake, so regardless of their feed-training status, they convert entirely to natural feed. It's really fun to watch. The pellet training is just a temporary tool that hopefully allows me to get these fish to a size that allows them a chance around those goofball largemouth.


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I just ordered 10 1KG flat-packs of bloodworms to feed to the little guys over the next few weeks. It was actually really cheap on a per unit basis. 22 pounds for $125. Shorty, if you need some more bloodworms I'll happily trade for some YOY's next year. smile


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Here's our buddy Alex Gonzales from Recycled Fish with one of the beautiful quarry redears. It was his personal best. This fish would have been stocked when it was about 3 ounces, and now probably weighs about 22 ounces.



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Picture doesn't even do that fish justice. It was impressive to say the least!

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Originally Posted By: Bruce Condello
I just ordered 10 1KG flat-packs of bloodworms to feed to the little guys over the next few weeks. It was actually really cheap on a per unit basis. 22 pounds for $125. Shorty, if you need some more bloodworms I'll happily trade for some YOY's next year. smile


I should be good on bloodworms, I am only overwintering 5 RES, thank you for the offer. smile

My five RES are just as enthusiastic about night crawlers as they are bloodworms so long as the night crawlers are sliced into pieces less than a 1/2" in length.



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Thanks to you monkeys, I just spent four hours reconfiguring my entire fish room. I had one dead RES in the zinc coated metal tank and I about lost my mind. The metal tank is now the waste tank. laugh


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Originally Posted By: Bruce Condello
Thanks to you monkeys, I just spent four hours reconfiguring my entire fish room. I had one dead RES in the zinc coated metal tank and I about lost my mind. The metal tank is now the waste tank. laugh


Good move! Us monkeys work for free some times wink laugh

For feed training, check into Otohime fish diets.

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Originally Posted By: Bruce Condello
The goal is to get these fish big enough to release in the Quarry as soon as possible. I've got a few five to seven pound bass in the quarry that would love to make these redears into a snack. The quarry, evidently because of the limestone induced water chemistry, is a haven for snails. I'd like to maintain a decent population of redears to keep the snails in check. The redears stocked over the last three years have thrived and grown into beautiful 1+ pound specimens. Interestingly, I've never seen a single redear come up to pellets in my lake, so regardless of their feed-training status, they convert entirely to natural feed. It's really fun to watch. The pellet training is just a temporary tool that hopefully allows me to get these fish to a size that allows them a chance around those goofball largemouth.


O.K. makes sense to me. However keep those temps up in the upper 70's, ammonia, and nitrites basicially zip and you should have some fastest growth rates on natural feed. Keep the tank as clean as you can since your tank isn't self cleaning. For the best growth rates possible you need to not only feed quality feed and keep temps optimum but you need to keep any stressors low which included no ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates below a certain level by doing water changes. It's too bad you don't have one of these for a biofilter. Really easy to build.

http://www.koiphen.com/forums/showthread.php?69028-Birdman-s-Fluid-Bed-Filter

You can downsize the outlet to 2 inches if your flow is under 20 gpm and 40 lpm (40 watts) should be enough for the filter itself. I use a 60 lpm for both the filter and a diffuser in the center of a 300 gallon fish tank.

Here's where I get my linear air pumps at:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Air-Pump-40w-New...=item25826bed90

They are so quiet you can hardly hear them and very efficient.

And here is the plastic media for about 26.00 per cubic feet. You would probably only need a couple of cubic feet.

http://www.w-m-t.com/Products/WaterTek_MB3_Moving_Bed_Media.php

The above filter is really easy to build although I use Uniseals to put all my fittings in. You can forgo the hamster ball by using some plastic mesh. My water inlet is only 3/4 inch so the media is to big to fit into it.

I use a small 600 gph mag drive pump to run water into the bottom from the top of another drum filled with plastic deer fench mesh as a mechanical filter. Put a drain in the bottom and you can hose off the filter material ever few days or once a week and drain the solids down the drain. I use a pve siphon tube to run the tank water to the bottom of this barrel to trap solids. Very simple but yet very very effective.




Last edited by Cecil Baird1; 11/27/13 07:32 PM.

If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.






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"Keep the tank as clean as you can." wink

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Originally Posted By: JKB
"Keep the tank as clean as you can." wink


Of settleable solids and and suspended solids which is easiest to do with a dual drain system. As far as other surfaces no big deal.


If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.






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Cecil, what would it cost me to have you come out and build it?


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I make a list of materials, you get them together, you pay for round trip flight and meals while I'm there and we'd be good.


If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.






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Can the same filter service both tanks?


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Wife says she does not remember on the TetraBetta food but thought around a couple bucks. She got it at Wal-Mart.

It is actually a very small round floating pellet. Smaller than a BB. When I first tried it the RES were not hitting anything on the surface yet so I dropped it into the filter water flow stream so it would drive the pellets down to their depth and they took it right away. Once they got a taste of it they now will hit it anywhere and look for it on the surface. Sometimes it floats against the glass and they hit it so hard you can hear them hitting the glass. They definitely like it.

She did a quick search on line and found it priced anywhere from $1.28 to about $2.75.

Here is the exact bottle we have but she bought it at Wal-Mart
TetraBetta floating mini pellets

Here is a big container but it says "Plus" on it. Did not read to see what the "Plus" means. Looks like it is 12 oz for $22 so may be as cheap to buy small containers if found at the right place.

12 oz container

Hope this helps.

Last edited by snrub; 11/27/13 10:22 PM.

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Here is a 50% protein floating pellet.

50% floating pellet


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snrub, what's the water temps that those fish are in?


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Bruce, the amount of headaches and time saved screwing around that Cecil would save you would be well worth having him come out and get you up and running. Very well worth it!!

If I ever decide to go the tank route for ANY fish, Cecil would be my paid on-site conusltant.


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Yeah, probably setting up a basic system wouldn't hurt.


Last edited by JKB; 11/28/13 07:19 PM.
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Originally Posted By: Bruce Condello
Can the same filter service both tanks?


Yes but you would still want a clarfier barrel and siphon for each tank to remove both suspended solids and some settleable solids before thet reach the bottom of the tank. The external standpipe for each tank removes the settleable solids.

If you go with a biofilter barrel for each fish tank you could handle more fish in the long run.

One problem I see with trying to change things midstream is you have to have a place to put the fish while you retrofit the tanks. And it will take about three weeks to get the biofilter cycled. If it seems to be working now perhaps no major changes should be done before the next season? On the other hand I hope you don't run into problems before then. If you increase water temps your percentage of un-ionized ammonia will go up.


Last edited by Cecil Baird1; 11/28/13 12:02 PM.

If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.






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Room temp so probably around 72 I would guess. No thermometer in tank.


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Bruce,

There is a way to reduce the amount of un-ionized ammonia, which is by lowering the Ph. If you do it slowly and your alkalinity is not low it's pretty safe. I did this during the summer in my aqaponics system outdoors to allow maximum uptake of nutrients to my tomatoe plants. My Ph is normally in the mid 8 range and by adding small amounts of muriatic acid to a five gallon bucket, and then my clarifier tank, I was able to drop my Ph in the 6.8 to 7.0 range.


If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.






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