Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Anyone know any feeder fish that can handle cold to warm water?

Goldfish.

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What is this for Zman?

Are you planning on growing/breeding feeder fish? As a total diet or part diet?

Second that. Goldfish are good system keepers. But feeding them on barra pellets does make them grow large..

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I wanted to see if i could breed feeder fish to feed to the trout/silvers when they get bigger.

I was looking into guppies and glass shrimp but guppies need heated water.

Also they will only be part of the their diet.

One thing (I think) you will need to watch out for will be if you begin feeding them live food and they go off the pellets. You will need to make sure you can breed enough.

Is this an exercise to try and save money, change the taste, fatten them up faster or none of the above?

A question for the experts: do Trout and Barra eat live food in one sitting or do they let is rot in the water pecking at it from time to time?

iv seen a murray cod snap a goldfish in one go

I had 5 small koi in the tank before I got some trout. The trout seemed to grow a lot quicker than the koi. Funny thing is I haven't seen those koi for a while now.... guess they must be hiding.

We fed some mollies to our big Barra in the shop, he didn't eat them all straight away, took him a couple of days to eat the 4-5 small fish. After that, he didn't eat pellets for for about a week, he would grab the pellet but then spit them out..

Personally I won;t be feeding him live feed again, I'd rather he just keeps eating his regular meals of pellets.

Both trout and barra should snap up the smaller fish in one go... Trout, I think aren't that picky with food, they could go from live food to pellets without much fuss. Barra on the other hand is pretty picky, so if you want to feed them live food make sure you keep the feed up or like EB they will go off the pellet for a week or more before they decide that they have only pellets to choose from and hence starting taking pellets again...

But honestly, I don't think it is really worth the effort... stick to pellets...

I breed up some for that purpose but it's only a very small part of their diet.

The problem is, the numbers just multiply out too quickly;

If you have 50 trout and intend to make a significant dent in you feed bill ('cause otherwise it's not worth the effort) then you would want to provide say 2 days worth of meals to them.

A hungry trout of say 200g would easily consume two large female guppies (Gambusia, platys, swordtails, whatever) in a day, probably more, but we'll keep it at 2 so I can do the math.

So, you need to be able to provide 200 feeder fish, week in, week out to reduce your pellet feed by about 30%. That's a lot of fish. To be able to remove 200 adult feeders from a population and still have enough to keep producing 200 a week would require a population in excess of 10,000

And what is the food bill for the feeders?

oh, and fish that will survive warm and cold will probably not keep breeding year round.
Tilapia might be able to provide plenty of fry for feeding to other fish but you need warm water for that and you need them to be legal.

Cherry shrimp or ghost shrimp or something else of that sort might make for a good feed supplement but I think they also require warm water for good breeding.

Yeah, if you're going to feed the feeders, it's totally pointless.

You need your feeders to be able to live outside and feed off the natural primary production (algae, zooplankton, insects, etc), otherwise there's no gain/savings for you.