Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

In response to my last post. I am catching fingerling size tilapia from a local body of water here in Botswana, Africa. There are a few varieties that i know of here such as Mozambique, and Nile, amungst others. With my last post i found out that identification will be next to impossible at this early stage and that many of the species will interbread. My concern is that they will be sterile. Back home in the U.S. if you cross a musky with a northern pike you get a tigermusky but they are unable to reproduce. Horse with donkey equals a mule and they too are sterile. I would like to eventually breed my own fish. Does anyone know if two different tilapia are mixed will their offspring be sterile? Although i love going to the dam and catching fish it is very time consuming and I don't want to be doing this for the entirety of my ap system... Any thoughts?

And here is a challange...Maybe somebody can beat Tlynx to the first post ha ha.

Your only option may be to grow up a batch of fingerlings together and cull off the unwanted species as you can identify them before they reach breeding stage. Mozambique's are fairly easy to breed, so once you have a population of what you know are that species you should be right to breed them. From my experience with fish keeping you should be ok, alot of Malawi Cichlids often interbreed and produce fertile hybrids. Because they are interbreeding Talipia's, they should stile be able to breed. Its not like breeding an Oscar with a Barra.

Raise out a dozen or two of the fingerlings til you can sex them then separate til they mature for breeders, before maturity you should be able to ID them as to species,

in your area they are apt to be a stabilized hybrid, if so and you want one species over the other you can easily place some of your females with males of the species that you prefer. The hybrids will backcross with either parents.