Azteca, after your video, another video popped up from your channel. Are those YP attacking the floating feed? Wow!! How did you train the yellow perch to be so aggressive to eat fish food?
The YP I originally purchased from Rex (Rainman) five years ago were all feed trained. All offspring have remained feed trained. I recently cleaned 8 nice sized YP all caught at the north end of our pond (feeder and sunken cedar trees are all at south end). It’s only a 1ac pond, but when cleaning the fish, I was surprised to see the Optima BG feed in every one. I didn’t think they traveled around the pond that much.
After about 1 month the fry now stand together they have about 3/4 to 1 inch.
I would like to make a video, but you will see hundreds of tadpoles attract by the light an the food, but for the work they do I am ready to let them take some food from the fry, my pond is free to filamentous algae and clean.
I can't wait to see when the Yellow perch fry will start to spin under the light if the tadpoles will stay there.
2 weeks ago I gave a lot of fry to a friend in exchange for a 300 gallon tank, I don't know how many fry I have now, I will keep them until the end of September, then I will give them.
I can't wait to work with the tank, I will put eggs in it and feed the larvae in drip below the light up to 12 to 15 days.
Despite my mistakes, I have fun, I hope you like these little video, as they get bigger I will make other video
There is only about 2 feet of water and with the temperature of 35c-36c I keep about 3/4 of the pond in full shade, otherwise the water would become too hot and I would have a profusion of filamentous algae, there is no more tadpole to eat the algae.
Since about 3 weeks the small perch start to turn around the light at a good speed they are conditioned.
azteca - I am thinking the smallness and shallow nature of your fry-fingerling pond works to your benefit in that it helps promote the good success that you have in feed training the perch. Fish are more concentrated and more likely to find the initial food offering. Good work there.
Instead of tadpoles to eat the filamentous algae, I would like to put about 10 female crayfish with eggs in a small cage to better remove them when the small crayfish will be ready.
All of this is fine, but unlike my small pond , I have to clean the tank.
I bought a siphon, but how to clean the tank without siphoning the larvae. I thought of 2 things, I will put a 90 microns mesh at the end of the siphon. Also I will close the light under the feeder, and turn on another light on the other side of the tank. What do you think. A+
I my past aquarium days I would have fish eggs hatch out in the aquariums and sucking them up with the cleaning siphon was a concern. I would use a hose as a siphon and suck only the fry out into a separate container and then clean the tank. Once the tank was clean I would pour the fry back in. This is assuming you can get the fry to move away from the debris so you can collect just the fry. I also set the siphon flow as low as possible so that the rapid water flow through the hose was less harsh on the fry, but would still suck up the fry.
I am afraid that the fry sucked up against your 90 micron mesh screen for any length of time might kill them.
I am assuming that you have debris on the bottom of the tank that needs to be cleaned out. If you are only doing partial water changes, I would suggest that you connect your siphon hose to the bottom of a bucket and then put your mesh over the top of the bucket. This will reduce the velocity of the water at the mess and reduce the likelihood of sucking fry up against the mesh.
All of this is fine, but unlike my small pond , I have to clean the tank.
I bought a siphon, but how to clean the tank without siphoning the larvae. I thought of 2 things, I will put a 90 microns mesh at the end of the siphon. Also I will close the light under the feeder, and turn on another light on the other side of the tank. What do you think. A+
Like QA, I think this risks killing the fry. First I would mention that unless you are overfeeding ... cleaning the tank isn't all that important over the time period that is reasonable. The fry will grow so fast as to fill the carrying capacity of the aquarium in a short period of time.
The best setup would be to have a filtering system that used the bottom substrate as a filter. So there is a plenum under the filtrate that has 1 or more risers into which air is pumped. This causes a flow that pulls water through the substrate and then finally out the risers back into the aquarium. The water flowing through the substrate is oxygenated allowing a good population of bacteria to clean the water and consume excess feed. A kind of RAS system. Some plants in the water like eelgrass would complete the system. If you are putting excess feed in that is too greatly affecting water quality, you could do water exchanges to improve water quality.
For the siphon suction screen you can use 500um instead of 90um and still not suck up more fry than using he 90um mesh. This will allow removing larger 'dirt' particles and more efficient tank cleaning.
Thank you Quarter Acre, ipsdad, Mr.Cody, for your proposal it is appreciated.
This is my first time using a tank, here after having had a period of heat it is now close to freezing at night, so everything is in slow motion.
During this time I am having fun with the big Yellow-perch in the pond, with a dispenser of large gardens worms that I made.
They start to stir the dispenser, they pull the worms, they must find that the worms do not fall quickly enough. The dispenser is placed around 1 to 2 inches above the water A+ I subscribe.
There are some nice big Daphnia swimming with the fry. The eggs must have hatched several days apart due to several sizes of small perch or are they all the same ribbon?
To follow up on a conversation we had on another post, using the eggs of latecomers to feed the first fry.
In my tank, the first larvae hatched around April 16, so they have 11 days. I just put ribbons that were laid yesterday April26, so they should hatch around May4-5, while the first fry should be 17-18 days old.
To date, it's going very well in my tank and in my little pond.
I have large colonies of Daphnia and with the heating the zooplankton is more and more numerous.
April 29, this morning I fond 3 large ribbons of eggs, I put another in the tank and the 2 others in my small pond, if it works it will make a nice additional food for the first fry. A+
The temperature heats up a lot, today I put panels on about 2/3 of the small pond to control the filamentous algae, and to control the algae in the rest of the small pond I put Ostracods.
Ceriodaphnia reticulata is a small form of a Daphnia shaped Cladoceran common in many ponds and lakes. No doubt in my mind that Univ of Montreal workers identified them correctly. Ceriodaphnia indicate your water quality is good and they make very good food for fish fry.
At the end of July, the small Yellow-perch are more than 4 inches, this will be the last report since there are too many I have lots more than last year, I will transfer them to the big pond.
Next year I will put Smallmouth bass larvae from a friend's pond.
Thanks for the update, I'm interested in trying YP in my North Carolina pond. Not to necessarily grow big ones, but to provide forage for my Blue Cats and possibly HSB, as I'm trying to stay away from the usual BG/LMB pond. Keep the updates coming when you have time
