Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I live on the coast in California. Our weather stays pretty normal usually between 50-75 degrees farenheit. I wanted to use tilapia, but it is against Department of Fish and Game regulations. Any help would be great. Oh yeah I plan on eating the fish.

Welcome NG, some of our friendly american forumers should be along to help on fish selections...looking forward to many pics of your system as it takes shape

On the coast I would think the water could stay cool enough for trout except, perhaps, for the fall. But with some ground-contact for thermal buffering you should be fine.

I'm not sure how channel catfish would handle cooler water, but expect it would slow their feeding/growth so one would need more fish per SF of growbed than one would with tilapia.

Sometimes people sell tilapia either in ignorance of the law or ignoring it. One fellow got his at a pet store being sold as tropical fish (technically true..). They are pretty nice, but hard to keep warm enough in a cool coastal climate. There are sources of all-male hybrids and you can often snag some mixed-sex fry from other BYAPers.

Cal DFG has various hoops to jump through for any fish fingerling purchase, transport, stocking, etc...frustrating, but somewhat sensible considering the ecosystems we are dealing with here. You can always find folks who will just dump fish into the wild like the snakeheads in the eastern U.S. watersheds who wreck it for the rest of us. Then again, there is no control on goldfish and people dump those everywhere: I saw a 12"+ one just yesterday in a lake in Colusa County.

Anyway, if you are willing to work with DFG, try trout. If not.....um...tilapia? But your heating bill will be high.

Good luck!

Hi, just posted this on another similar thread; hope it's of some use:

I've talked and corresponded with DFG lately and my understanding is that for personal use (aka "private stocking"), O. mossambicus and O. hornorum tilapia are OK for us to raise in a closed system. They are not on the DFG's restricted species list and are not, like the 3 other tilapia species listed there, limited to south of the Tehachapi Mountains.

Technically, getting some would require 1 or 2 permits: a stocking permit, and if acquiring from an out-of-state supplier, an importation permit. Each permit is $50 more or less. See http://www.dfg.ca.gov/fish/Administration/Permits/

Raising fish to sell is a whole other ballgame: regulated not as private stocking, but as commercial aquaculture, and there's a $700 annual permit for that to start with...