Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

G'Day Gang,
Been meaning to ask this for a long time.
I am sure my silvers have bred. What I was wondering is Barra belong to the perch family and when young they are male then change to female when older. Would that hold true for silvers? My silvers are probably 4 years old but there are fish in there that are nowhere near the size of the older ones, which makes me think they have had babies at some point.
What are your thoughts?

Cheers
Dennis

I'm quite confident they are either male or female for life.
What volume of water are they living in?
I have a sneaky suspicion that some Aussie natives could be bred in tanks. Raising the fry would probably be the most difficult part.
Keen to hear other peoples' experience and thoughts on the matter myself.

They are in a ibc and are a bit over crowded at the moment. The male felmale thing is a bit interesting though.

Anything I say is really only conjecture and possibly naive or completely wrong but I'd normally think that fry would have a hard time finding suitable food or sanctuary in most systems. None the less I wouldn't be stunned to find out someone had a welcome surprise. Really hope that you have!
If eggs or fry made it to a duckweed tank or sump that had a culture of infusoria (?), daphnia or little critters in it there is a chance that they might make it through to fingerling size.
Not saying that's happened in your case but if silvers don't eat small fry and you have slightly 'green' water there might be a slim chance. Pretty sure they'd eat up any fry but I don't have experience outside of aquariums and small garden ponds as of yet. So take anything I say with a grain or two of salt!

Silver Perch will only breed with hormone injection in a tank.

They are not the same as Barra, they stay the same sex from birth.

There has been a case of someone with an unwatched tank down the back of a country property that had silvers breed, it is very uncommon and the fish had been in there many years.
It seemed that a somewhat more natural environment had developed in/around the tank.

There is no chance that your Silvers have bred successfully in your tank. This question pops up fairly regularly and its because there is a huge variance in the growth rate of Silvers. As an example some of my largest Silvers from last years spawning were not far off edible size at 12 months of age yet some of their brothers were still the size of my thumb nail !!!

What troutman said... i have a few silvers I'd be happy to eat and some that are only marginally bigger than when i had them delivered last october or november

Yep to the above two posts, some of them just don't grow

If the biggest ones are removed does that trigger the smaller ones to grow quicker?

Ive noticed this summer as I have removed a large percentage of the bigger SP that the stragglers are finally putting some growth on.