esshup (and others),
Is your advice essentially to stock as many tilapia mouths as you can afford? For example, if your supplier offers 3-4", buy more of those instead of the 5-6" size?
Is there a problem with slow-growers buying the smaller fish? Or are those fish just from the last spawn of the previous year?
Finally, your anecdote about the tilapia kill sounds like the perfectly bad conditions of transport stress and then cold stress hitting the fish at the same time. Does anyone have an estimate about how long the transport stress would last for tilapia? I am just asking to see if your weather forecast predicted a cold front 6 days in the future, would that be enough for your tilapia to survive the dip in temperatures, or would it be better to wait another week? (And maybe run into supplier schedule troubles etc.)
