Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Barra from the TAFE into the system yesterday . They seem to have settled in well with a water temp around 22 which is is about what they were in at the TAFE. Also dropped three mongrel goldfish into the tank today that were donated from a parents pond. Will be interesting to see how they go with the barra which I estimate are around 200 grams. Two of the goldies were bigger than that and one smaller so they will either get by or become barra food.

The two marron are still happily living in the bottom of the tank and the third one is still carrying her berries in the classroom. From what I have read we can expect the juveniles to appear around mid December.

Picks of Barra and mongrel goldies mixing it up. The Barra seem to ignore them completely at the moment. They are however settling in and not feeding as yet so we will have to wait and see what happens when they are hungry.

Checked on mummy marron this morning and most of the berries have very recently hatched, should be recognisable as larvae soon

She is currently located in the in class micro system, I will move her to a large fish tank next week so I can more easily monitor them. The tank will be linked into the inclass system for filtration. As soon as they get large enough and she releases them she will join the others back in the outside system. The juviniles will remain in the fish tank to grow out some over the summer. Depending on survival we will then assess whether we need another tank outside just for marron next year.

Very cool Burnsy - good luck with the larvae - keep us posted.

Mummy marron kicked out all the little ones over the weekend so they are all making their own way around the nursery tank under mum's watchful eye (she is no longer hiding and is out with them).

Good work Burnsy.

Might have to wait 5 years or so before you can eat them

Hi Burnsy ...

You probably know this already ... but ....

One of those blue shell shaped kiddy wader pools stacked with pebbles and cut off plastic pipe for the babies ... works well!

add an air line .. careful how you set up the air line as they could use the tube as an escape route ...

I managed to raise 153 baby yabbies from a mother in berry that I purchased from Gozzy markets ... I grew to 1.5 - 2.0 cm juveniles this way before giving them to school...

The kiddoe pool had so many hide holes they didn't fight each other..

Good stuff mate!

I would get mummy marron out of that tank Burnsy as she will eat all the juveniles. Once they have left the mother they dont need her for anything.
In a pond situation you can get them to 250gms in under 2 years, I imagine growth in tanks will be a bit slower though I expect you will get a feed in a similar time frame.

Will check they have all been released and kick her out today if they have. Any idea how many each female will produce on average? I reckon we have about 15-20 little ones but I know i lost some with moving her around and checking on them

Update time, we got about 30 odd little marron take off on there own about the time of my last post and I send mum back to the big pond, about two days later something went horribly wrong with the water quality, it went nasty overnight and we lost all but about 10. End of holidays I can find one, maybe more, they are still so small it will be impossible to find them till they get a lot bigger.

Outside we had a major algal bloom (second one since startup) right on when school broke up and I went to Christmas with the timers running 15/30 (I think) and left it. Gardener was away till after Christmas so no feed for them for around 10 days. Came back just before new year and our water was the clearest it has ever been and it has stayed that way since.

Back to school this week and I did a bit of cleaning up in the tank today to clear a few leaves and hydroton from around the pump (kids like dropping stones and hydroton in) and got to have a look at what we actually have. I could count at least 16 barra, maybe 18 and two big goldfish left (one went belly up when the water temps first went up). Water is around 25 degrees and the barra have cleaned out the three big marron we had in there. The female in berry that is pictured in the posts above was the smallest of the three, the others would have been around 5cm longer.

Conclusion is, large marron happy with trout (and visa versa once the trout work out what the marron claws do and stay away from them). Marron unhappy with barra (but barra happy ).

Lots of lettuce seedlings coming up at the moment but we need to pull our spinach and a few other things and replant for the year, the sun has punished them.

Water clarity and barra

Glad to hear that it went well over the holidays Mike.
I bet the kids were keen to see the fish after the holidays

And good to hear you got through the holidays without any dramas... things look like they're going along just fine...

That is crystal clear water. Let us all know when/if it starts to cloud up again.

Burnsy they can have up to a couple of hundred from memory, and yes remove the mum asap or you will soon have none, you make an excellent mid wife