Cecil,
Are you catching your fry from your ponds or have you started doing something like this?
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.
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.
Understood. I can see how filtering the greenwater would not be feasible.
I don't 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.
Makes sense. Even the koi site I frequent frowns on rocks on the bottom of koi ponds for that reason.
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 doesn't help me with tank cleanup though.
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?
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.
Wow! That's small! Glad I don't have to deal with that!
