Pond Boss Forums FISH & FISHING Sunfish-Including Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass Bluegill spawn in 100 gallon aquarium.

Have you looked into the "instant algae" aquaculture feed for oysters. Not sure if it would work but maybe? I wonder if it might be able to get you at least through one stage.

http://www.reed-mariculture.com

I was reading about it today and looks like it might.

Rob C

I was not aware of the company and those product should absolutely work.

For the record the algae is not the product i need i need the rotifers and zooplankton. The algae is the food for the food.

However, I am trying to develop protocols for success in a more DIY type environment. Buying those products would add cost up fast and the fish i am reproducing arent expensive fish to buy.

Brian,

Good luck and thanks for keeping us posted.

Yeah one of the downsides I have found to keeping large numbers of fry in a tank when you feed them artificial feed is you have to feed them often, which easily dirties up the water due to it's fine size. And of course feeding fry up to 8 times a day produces a lot of waste that is also fine.

Fortunately my new circular cone bottom tank, in conjunction with a external stand pipe, and my clarifier tank seem to do a good job of cleaning the water. I also use a sock type foam filter on my pump to clean the water further. (I have to clean the foam twice a day.) You probably do that too?


The feed I've been using from Allied Aqua has really helped me keep the water swimming pool clean once I graduate to the floating pellets. Even though it's tilapia feed it's still 50 percent protein just above the crumble size and floats. This is not the case with Aquamax. I find once my bluegill take the sinking they have no problem coming up for the floating feed once they are large enough. I also keep the water at 80 F. which makes them along with the tilapia in the same tank feed like pirhana. I think mixing in tilapia with my bluegill makes them more aggressive feeders.

The cone bottom tank was free from one of the schools I supply a system and fish to is worth it's weight in gold for feed training fry.

Cecil,

are you catching your fry from your ponds or have you started doing something like this?

no, I have no filtration setup right now. To keep green water I am just siphoning off 10-20% water from the top of the aquarium to the green water tank then i pump green water back in.. I do this twice a day about 12 hours apart. This could result in fry being siphoned into the green water tank which for this run i am accepting as ok but not my long term plan.


I dont have a good strategy defined for tank cleaning. I have only vacuumed the tank once so far. I use an aquarium vacuum/siphon and i siphon to a 5 gallon bucket.. i fill it no more than 2gallons full and let it settle overnight
then i pour the water back into the tank to try to save any fry that may have been siphoned up


In my next go around i plan to remove all of the bottom substrate and the ornaments so the sediment can be vacuumed easier.

I have an idea of siphoning through a ceramic air stone in the future. I have an extra and i think i can use it to help do water changes without fry escaping. That doesnt help me with tank cleanup though.


These guys are so small i dont think a sock or many filters that i could put on a pump that are fine enough to keep from removing fry. Some of the algae particles are bigger than the fish

You're light years ahead of me by hatching inside and using the greenwater approach. Since I have two 1/10th acre ponds at my disposal, I place my broodfish and let them hatch in the ponds. Then when they are about a inch to an inch and a half I seine them out and then bring them inside. The downside is it can be tricky to get a bloom going, or OTOH it can get out of hand and cause oxygen issues.



Understood. I can see how filtering the greenwater would not be feasible.







Makes sense. Even the koi site I frequent frowns on rocks on the bottom of koi ponds for that reason.



What about some kind of foam filter that you have several clean ones available and you just keep changing them out? Or would the fry be small enough to get inside the foam?




Wow! That's small! Glad I don't have to deal with that!

The red ear fry are about three weeks old. Still have between 100-200 alive. They are impossible to truly count because there are alot of them, they are still very difficult to see. The algae blooms have died off. I still do partial water changes to keep the water clean and fresh, but I feel pretty confident that they are eating and growing on crushed/powdered aquamax 400 fish food.

They dont eat at the surface or off the ground so it looks like they only eat as he particles fall.

Shot a 2 min video. The fry are still mostly translucent but they are big enough for the video to pick them up. There's also about two dozen tilapia fry in the aquarium. I saw them swimming at the top of my aquaponics tank yesterday and rescued a few.


-edit- i tried watching the video through the forum youtube window and it wasnt good enough. You will probably need to click the fullscreen button to get a good view

i have been vacuuming the tank and putting the waste water in the outside "algae" tanks.

Between the nutrients from the waste water and/or a little acidic rain water the algae bloom has started up again. So i have to consider that it wasnt "spent" just starved for nutrients.

This seems like a good thing because i have been reading the SRAC articles and it looks like these fish can filter feed on these microscopic zooplankton until they are 1.5-2inches long. I assumed they moved up in zooplankton size more quickly but maybe not.

So i am still feeding powder but also water changes with the alge tank is adding algae and zooplankton. I'll take more pictures when they get closer to .5-1" in length which is still probably a couple of weeks away.

at one point this summer i added 200-300 tilapia fry to the aquarium for holding. They were about the same size as the red ear so i didnt think they would eat each other but it turned out to be tragic for the red ear as far as food competition. I lost most of the red ear but a few survived. I have about 20 that are eating crushed up commercial feed and this will probably be my last report in 2014. Since they are eating crushed up commercial feed i consider it trivial that i will get them to eat complete pellets form the surface when they are older. I will move these guys outside into my aquaponics system as soon as they are big enough to 1) eat pellets and 2) not get eaten by the other res, bluegill and feed trained hybrid crappie.

I look forward to next year to hopefully trying to reproduce the feed trained black crappie i have in my garage.

I liked using the 55 gallon aquarium so i could monitor growth and progress easily but going forward i wont be using aquariums for fry growout. I will be putting them straight into a large outdoor algae bloom in a minimu of IBC tank and maybe bigger fish tanks.

In the video i kept saying algae and implying the fry were eating algae but the algae bloom is really food for the zooplankton which the fry eat. But visibly it's just algae bloom water when i use it.

I dont think i ramble too much in the video, all good information (imho)