Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Tony,

I just took a class of 24 of our year 8 Special Agriculture students to Challenger TAFE.

They had a blast. They were engaged, interested and gave great feedback.

I am hoping to take my other year 8 Special Agriculture class in the near future.

On behalf of myself and my students a big thank you.

We were greeted by your presenter as you were attending our school aquaculture facility.

Your presenter was excellent, informative, enthusiastic, pitched the level of information very well and was very good with the students who were excited and therefore a little chatty at times, but they were engaged.

I highly recommend a visit to anyone reading this.

Thanks again

Johnnie

Sorry Tony, didn't hear from you so didn't know if it's still on....

what time is this happening can be there in an hour

I apologise but I didn't realize that there were still more interest in visiting the hatchery.

Consequently I will give a tour this friday 8th May at 3 p.m. If anyone wants to participate then please contact me on my mobile 0430514069. The tour takes about 45 minutes.

John thanks for your positive comments and I'm pleased you and your students enjoyed the tour. Dean our technician was very impressed by the Kelmscott Highschool class and by all means contact me in the future for another tour.

Challenger Tafe has had Silver Perch spawning at the fremantle hatchery. This is the first time that we have tried to spawn Silver Perch as we normally deal with marine species. The broodstock were picked up from Golden Ponds and we injected them here at the tafe hatchery.
So far so good and we have about 800,000 larvae on the go. All the fingerlings have been ordered by one buyer ( Golden Ponds) and they want 1000,000 fingerlings.
I thought forum members may be interested in some pics of the process.




There are more photos in the Forum/Fish/No Overwintered fish this year in WA.

As I am at the hatchery every day now including weekends I'm happy to show any Forum members around this weekend. I will take a group through on Saturday 7th November at 10 a.m. or Sunday 8th November at 10 a.m.
If you would like to come along please send me a PM telling me which day you will attend and I will get back to you with more details. The tour will take about 45 minutes.

Tony, are you guys going to do another spawning?

Outback we are planning to get more broodstock from Golden Ponds and conduct another spawning run in a week or so.

Cool, any plans to sell them to us AP'ers like the Bream last year?

Hi Outback,

The Silver Perch are all going to Golden Ponds as we used his Broodstock and secondly he has ordered all the fish we produce from us. Golden Ponds intends to onsell Silver Perch to the public.
Regarding the Black Bream we are intending to do another run early next February with my students. There will hopefully be fish available later next year. Once again most of this years Black Bream have gone to Golden Ponds but as the Broodstock Black Bream are our fish we can sell to whoever wants them.

G'day Tony

I did 3 days work experience at the Hatchery back in mid-September as part of my Cert II in Aquaculture. Didn't get to meet you but caught up with Bruce and the other guys.

Interested to know;

- how are the snapper larvae going - they were sub-microscopic when I was there ?

- have you managed to get the pair of Breaksea Cod eating anything yet ?

Cheers

Nigel

Nigel the snapper are now 10 cms and they are doing very well now the warm the warm weather has arrived. We have a few thousand in tanks.

We haven't done much with the pair of Breaksea Cod. There still there but we haven't tried to get them to spawn

I have not had much luck with the Bream Tony, especially during winter. They look fine externally, but just die. Same tank water as Trout and Silver Perch that had 100% survival rate.

pH between 6 and 7.6.
Temps as low as 7 (2 days this winter) rest of the time around 12-16.
Salt at around 1- 2 ppt.

Even with the warmer weather now, I have had one or two die, I dont think there are any left at all.

Golden ponds will sell the fish for a huge markup too no doubt.

Hi Outback,

I've never been a fan of Black Bream for an aquaponics system. These are a euryhaline water species that move between brackish water (2-3 ppt) and seawater (35 ppt).
The bottom line is that they never evolved for fresh water (< 2ppt). They are essentially a marine fish and continued exposure to the combined effects of fresh water at low temperatures (< 12 C) means they are struggling to cope with an abnormal environment. Being in Kalgoolie, a desert environment, where the air temperature will drop below 10 C at night or even less (and I lived in Broken Hill where in winter the garden hose would snap due to the frozen water in it). The bigger fish seem to cope better with the adverse cold conditions but the fingerlings will always struggle.
Added to the fact that they are a slow growing species then I would be looking for another species such as Silver Perch for an all round species. The interesting thing about Black Bream is that they actually quite attractive aquarium fish.. so long as the water temperature is > 18 C. They take on a silvery appearance in aquariums and being slow growing they don't out grow the aquarium too quickly.
We have sold a lot of Black Bream to farmers who have inland saline water and this has proven to be reasonably successful but again they do so much better with a little bit of salt. The problem in the past has been that around Perth sometimes there is nothing else available.