Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

How many folks are using live feeds as partial or whole diet for their fish?

Last year I had a tank full of guppies that I was raising as feeders, unfortunately temperatures dropped before I was ready and I lost them all to cold. I'm going to try again this year. Guppies are easy and breed rapidly, and they can be fed with daphnia which are also easy to raise.

One of the advantages I see for using live feed is that there's no danger of live feed fouling up your AP system if you overfeed. E.g. if i dump a whole net full of guppies into my AP fish tank, and my catfish only eat a third of them at once, the rest of the guppies can just swim around and get eaten later. Pellet food would have to be scooped out or else it would get moldy and could foul the water.

I have, mostly fed worms but also some minnows. One disadvantage is that you can introduce fish diseases. Feeder goldfish are notorious for doing this sort of thing. If you're raising them yourself there is less chance of this.

Once you start feeding live food often it's hard to get your fish to take their normal food again (ie pellets) as they prefer the live food.


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I'm feeding slaters to my trout, only a few dozen at a time (not many for over 260 fish in the big system), but am in the process of breeding their numbers up so I can feed them more. They also have the occasional worm, slug, snail, caterpillar etc.

how are you breeding the slaters?

See p26 for pics of the slater breeding box in my larger system thread.

It's just soil with organic matter on top.

Yesterday, I discovered that i was also breeding slaters, albeit inadvertently. I had sifted a bunch of compost into a 40-gallon rubbermaid storage tote a few weeks ago, forgot about it, and it got rained on. I had put the lid on about halfway through the rainy week we had here., but it was still full of water.

I just opened it yesterday to discover about 50-100 slaters crawling around on top, plus a huge number of tiny millipedes. The compost had turned into a rather disgusting looking sludge/slurry...