Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

P.S ... Mathew, are you in an elevated location?.... altitude will also affect your DO saturation......

Here's an article directly related to catfish, DO and temperature/altitude

http://www.planetcatfish.com/shanesworl ... cle_id=313

hey , how is the system going Mathew....

We eat off of it daily! We have put several houndred pounds of fish in the freezer, and have more on the way. We constantly are makeing upgrades and planning out things, however, we have had a lot of issues here(personal, like my wife had 13 heart attacks, among other things) over the last year+, so, I spend very little time on the forum. We have been very busy and I am sorry I have not been able to post much of our progress or adventure, and I don't have a camera that sends a picture worth viewing on line. I have been able to post a little more lately, however, I just don't have much time for it now. Perhaps that will change in the near future.

We are currently keeping about (150)Blue Gill, (200)Tilapia, and (30)channel cats (they are our protein source for our dog food, just served up 4 today, I have 3 dogs, one of which is an English Mastif that is about 200lbs), and are in the process of adding 4 more 4'x7' GBs, and have 4 large beds (4'x50') in the planning stage to add on, soon if possible.

That is a quick update, Thanks for asking.

Mathew

Wow, would love to see pictures when you can swing it!

Will do Dave!

Just read through your thread Mathew.
WOW
Sorry to hear about the troubles there lately, hope things improve.

Would love to hear more about raising blue gill in tanks when you have some time. Do they co-exist well with catfish and tilapia? I currently have channel catfish and blue tilapia but probably won't bother keeping tilapia over winter in the future as I spent too much money keeping my system warm this past winter.

TCL, could you not keep breeders alive indoors over winter? Did you indoor system have the bio filter capacity to keep the water clean?

I found the large aquarium was just not big enough to comfortably keep a breeding colony of tilapia. The male would harass the females even when the water was way too cool for breeding and the females would be all stressed out. If I put the dividers into the tank it was like having fish in tiny cells. Really didn't appeal and trying to get the indoor aquarium up to breeding temperature during winter would probably cost more on heating than I'm interested in along with the fact that the aquarium just doesn't seem big enough for it. I know it could be done but if bluegill are easy enough to raise in AP, perhaps it would be worth a switch since we don't seem to be eating as much tilapia as would be required to justify spending lots on heating.

I'll let you know how the bluegill work out. Matthew seems to have success with them; even with bad water conditions.

I saw a hundred or so of them feeding Sunday. Makes me wounder why the other 900 were not feeding also.