The last cold front that blew through had me cancelling survey jobs in order to harvest before we lost fish. Our water temps dropped to 56 one morning, which is just borderline mozambique tilapia death sentence. Anyway, we harvested to our holding facility capacity and left the rest, hoping to find someone who wanted quick forage. We did not.
There were 2 ponds left unharvested...one green pond that we knew was full of fish and one clear pond that never accepted feed very well. We figured the clear pond did not produce many this year.
Fish in the green pond are dead...we are raising buzzards. But as I drove around the pond yesterday as the sun was lingering bright and warm I noticed 1000s of tilapia in the clear pond...all in great shape...no fungus.
Moral of the story...clear ponds warm up faster than muddy or green ponds in sunny weather. This hold true with ponds that are clear and dyed blue as well...they warm up more during the daylight hours.
Both of these ponds started out as bluegill ponds early in spring 2005, but algae got out of control and we decided to switch them to tilapia ponds. Both ponds cleaned up by midsummer...stocked with 40 lbs per acre.
I just wanted to state my observations here...not making management or stocking recommendations.
