Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have just put out six two ltr bottle minnow traps at the local dam and am having much success catching fingerling size tilapia. the problem here in botswana is that nobody has records on what type of fish are in the dam. I know that there are nile and mozambique tilapia for sure and nembwe as well. i'm sure there are more. Eventualy i want to get only nile and bread them myself. will they all co-exist in an aquaponics system, and how do i tell the difenence at such a small size? Also how do i tell the male from female? i want to try to keep all males.

thanks

Jason

Hum, getting a positive ID might be a challenge. If they can inter breed, it might be impossible to be certain which ones you have since they might be essentially a cross breed already.

But if you look up the more scientific papers on the different breeds, you might be able to get details that might help you out telling which is which.

there are also ways to identify gender but that often requires them to be large enough to have matured the right parts. If you try to separate them while they are still too small, it makes it far more likely that you will miss-identify the gender. Apparently it is pretty easy to make mistakes when manually sorting tilapia. I know I've found it difficult to tell the difference between males and females by looking at their parts.

But, I'm now growing channel catfish as my primary fish since it can get too cold for tilapia here and because of that, the catfish are able to grow as fast as or faster than my tilapia.

Good luck

My uneducatred guess from your situation is that you probably have a stabilized hybrid of the two, I found this quite commonly in North Province in SA when I was teaching there, some looked Mosambigue and some , a few, Niloticus with the Mosambique in the majority. As we were only miles from the border that was understandable, but most I saw were clearly hybrids.

Both species btw are great for culture, if you have a stabilized hybrid run with it , you'll be glad in the long run that you did.