Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain gizzard shad vs. tilapia

Very nice....12 acres. I wonder why you don't see the water turkeys also. Maybe because there are so many large lakes in East Texas....for me Livingston and Rayburn are within flying distance. You are lucky.

I guess I should say my lake is 12 acres. You should be able to just click that above this post. It is the one with the island. That is where the beavers live and the does drop their fawns in early summer. It is cool to watch them swim the lake.
Thanks,
Bob

Hey Meadowlark, do you think you lost all your tilapia? I could not see any of mine on the banks or floating on the surface. I think the water got cold enough, but I have 22 foot depth with an average of 10 to 12 feet. I hope some made it, even though I plan to buy more this spring. Did you pick yours up? Mabey we should combine our orders to get extra discount from Todd.
Thanks,
Bob

Yes, I believe they are all dead. No sign of them for a couple of weeks now. I have some 22 foot depth also and should have tried to measure the water temperature at that depth, but I didn't. I don't think any survived.

I'm planning to have Todd shock/survey my pond this spring before re-stocking to get a baseline on where I'm at. He will bring my Tilapia with him when he comes out to do the survey. I'm looking forward to that and hoping I still have some fish left after the water turkey invasion.

I have three ponds here in Punta Gorda, Fla. which I use for my fly fishing schools.

Prior to stocking tilapia, I had bluegills and bass in the ponds. This resulted in bass which after period of time of catch and release were impossible to catch and whole slew of medium to pygmy bluegills and of course, the invasive walking catfish.

I then added blue tilapia. They grow to 2 bls plus down here the first year, and I now have ones to 10 lbs. Once accustomed to taking floating catfish food, they take a dry fly just like a brown trout.

Of couse, they breed like welfare receients. Solution? Bass weren't good enough predators to keep them in check, so I added channel catfish.

The channels eleminate enough of the tilapia fry to hold their populations just about right and also took care of the walking catfish!

Just wanted to post what I found out about getting tilapia here in Indiana. The Inland Aquatic people kept giving me run around on getting tilapia for me and never would give me any real info I was looking for. So I did as Bill Cody suggested and found a ex hog farmer, who turned the operation into a recirculating aquaculture farm and they raise Nile Tilapia (oreochromis niloticus). Mr Jim Bradley is owner and just spoke to him today. He told me to wait till water gets to about 65 and then I can go get them from him. Said they will be about 1/4 lb and bigger and that he gets almost $2 apiece but would let me have a hundred for $1 apiece. Name of his company is AQUA-MANNA, just northwest if Indianapolis, IND. about 30 miles in Ladoga IND. Now my question is I don't now how this type Tilapia will do on the filamentous algae and how many to put in. My pond is only 1/2 acrer and my brother wants what I don't use for his 10 acrer lake. Aqua-Manna has lot of info about their self on internet. I did a googles search to find them. This was the kind of committmet I was looking for in a supplier, real nice guy.

PO,

Excellent! If you aren't living on the edge, you're just taking up space.

My advice would be to start slowly. I've found that 5 pounds per acre is sufficient; the repro rate for Mozambique is amazing. It will be most interesting to see how the Nile perform.

Keep a good account of things and let us know.