Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I just had to post my new baby pictures!

Youtube link.


And for the naughty minded ones here, here is a some tilapia foreplay video too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fsx9_RPvMI&NR=1


Another female has a mouth full of just-hatched fry too.. I'd like to put them in the nursery tank together but I think the 1-week olds would eat the 1-day olds.

-ellie

How exciting! Congratulations on the birth. Are these your first?

Yes, keep the fry separated by age. The big will eat the small and even if they don't they get all the food.

> Are these my first?

Sort of.

We have a 7 year old (Homo Sapiens) and a 3 year old (homo sapiens) too, and the tilapia have had fry before but the canister filter and the other fish ate them. I found 4 alive in the filter and put them in a floating breeder tank, but the big fish would bump and knock the tank until one swam out. Then they would eat them. They really liked my little Tilapia-fry-Pez dispenser.

Aside from that macabre incident, yes these are our first.

-ellie

Careful, don't dip the camera into the water!

How big are your tank, they're much cleaner than what I'm used to.

The big fish are in a 46 gallon bowfront aquarium. The Babies are in a 30 Gallon standard aquarium. I have been overwintering the fish indoors.

For filtration I have a Rena Xp2 canister filter with foam, bio-stars, and a finishing pad. That was constantly getting clogged up with tilapia poo, so I added a separate mechanical filter. The mechanical filter is a 250gph powerhead attached to the top half of a 2 liter sprite bottle that has a coarse non-woven fiber pad in it and the ripped-out center of a cheap furnace air filter.

The nursery tank has a 1 liter water bottle with the top removed, perforated, and inserted into the bottom of the bottle with a plastic downtube attached. The bottle is full of activated carbon and water is pulled through the filter by a airstone pumping air into the base of the downtube.

For anyone who wants to do non-aquaponics Aquaculture, I just learned an unpleasant lesson. Nitrification lowers PH, and my pH had drifted down to less than 6. At that pH, the nitrifying bacteria in the filter died. I started adjusting the pH up over the course of several weeks and I have had a massive ammonia spike. I've added several cups of activated carbon to the canister filter and I really hope it controls it until the bacteria come back.

I've ordered a large sponge filter for the nursery tank but it won't be cycled until after the fish are ready to go into the growout tank.

-ellie

Wish you could have told me that
I wondered why my goatie was wet LOL.

The fish have been growing well, but I had a filter malfunction and lost 1/4th of them I feel awful.

The malfunction: I was moving stuff around in the nursery tank and knocked the airline off the charcoal filter. It went anaerobic and ... my living room smelled like rotten eggs and my fish started going belly up.

I replaced the charcoal, did a 75% water changes, dropped the temperature 10 degrees, and hooked up an auxiliary mechanical filter to suck out the dead bodies. I pulled roughly 50 of them out of them out.

Words fail to describe how awful I feel.

2 more weeks and I'll have my new 1,000 Gallon tank..

-ellie

you never get used to it but the pain will go away. Start working on the next batch. You were going to eat them anyway right?

Yes, they were for eating.

In other news, I looked in the breeder tank this morning and one of the females is carrying eggs. That is some consolation. I guess l will have to setup a divider in the nursery tank.

-ellie

Sorry for the losses Ellie. It's a shame they weren't eaten.

by you