Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

It's 2AM and I'm on this darn forum again. Had and idea after losing 7 fish due to negligence this morning - wouldn't it be cool if we could have a graph of the total BYAP forum community's fish population? When people lose or eat some of theirs you could tag it and the graph would go down. When people buy new fish or have babies the graph could go up! With cool icons and tags of people's names and little blurbs about what the event was, etc. Zoomable and pannable like Google Maps, ideally.

Maybe one of these could be inserted to your members thread so you could show your current population and people could look through the history of your system (graph should mostly go up! ).

Anyone know of some code that does this that could be used here? DDM care to whip something up?

Sorry to hear about your fish Dave. What happened? I'm especially interested because I just got a batch of fingerlings and I don't have a lot of fish experience.

Nice idea DD.... graph on the front banner (portal) page showing the total number of member's fish.....

Would be a nice reference to the growth of AP overtime.....

I like it too

I don't think the animal ethics people would like it very much. More deaths, one way or another compared to very few births. There are of course happy deaths at harvest and sad due to power failures, incompetence, lack of interest, unsuitablility etc.

faye , Don't sweat the small stuff ,, Wait till the Japanese discover Aquaponics and do it Jap sized ,, Whales and ALL ,, imagine the bumper stickers ..........

Perhaps the graph could be named ..... AHHH ,, Ecologically soundly grow protein source , recycled , consumption rate per APer?
We need to mention something aboput it being NON global warming.

AHHH ,, to show our religious tolerance we could put fish deaths under ..... protein sources sacrificed , each animal was faced toward Mecca before slaughter.

How about all deaths be reported as "Due to Power Failure"...

Hi Mark:
I failed to heed one of the commandments of AP (old thread), don't turn off pumps to do routine things like feeding the fish. Murphy's Law kicks in and if you can forget to turn them back on you will forget to turn them back on.

Faye I don't even want to eat my fish ATM because I want them around to get the plants going now that the weather is getting warm. I'll eat them if an Early Harvest Event happens though. What's left goes out into the compost bin. Are the animal rights people really powerful enough to be feared?

Power failure ..... think insurance company " Act of God".

Smiles

Dave I have no fear, but we do not want to upset anyone either. Some of my visitors love fresh fish, but somehow they behave uniquely when it is filletted in front of them after they have watched it swim around in the tank. I have also noticed how some people seem to give undue consideration to the fact that these fish get killed, like they kinda don't when they sell them in the supermarket. There is clearly not the emotional attachment when buying from a supermarket. Do you know what I mean?

Yep, in the modern world people are ignorant of where their food comes from. I was pretty squeamish when cutting up my first few because I didn't grow up with an experience of live food. I was actually trying to be respectful of the one fish yesterday because I had wanted to keep that one the most, over all the others really.

faye , I read of an experiment that once prooved that lettuce scream when they have a leaf cut off ,, of cause it was a chemical scream not audio.
Where is the line drawn? A few years back there was a VERY big push to ban live seafood tanks in restaurants ,, are these people that friggen stupid? or do they just have too much time and an extra big wish to make other people see things their way.
AHH and the latest ,, Aussie wool being banned because we cut the tails off ,, cut the tails off to stop them getting sick ,, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Perhaps this actually belongs in the venting corner ,, I feel better now

Isn't is amazing how people selectively apply judgment to things? Like if they didn't see the animal alive before they got the meat, then it is fine but if they know it was alive in the tank hours before dinner they get freaked out.

I suppose it is all part of the fact that we are now amidst generations of people who may have grown up not having to go get a chicken from the yard for dinner. Heck, many city kids think food all just comes from the grocery store and if asked how big a cow is they would probably say it's the size of a dog.

I think some sort of population graph would be neat. We would probably need to come up with a suitable euphemism for it so the casual glance of an outsider would perhaps just think it meant something else.

Oh, I know. Schools! Student population! I've got 45 students in my school of AP! Only 2 dropped out. One due to a misunderstanding with the pump intake and the other skipped class and was found hiding in the mulch next to the system. They were both sent to learn composting instead. Those that are harvested could be said to have transfered to culinary school.

They do a little more than chop the tails...but you're right, it's to stop them getting flyblown. I've heard that there are practical alternatives to mulesing - does anyone here know?

the alternatives to mulesing are few, the aim is to produce a sheep the has no hair growth in the bum region but to breed that into the asutralian flock will take a long time, the alternatives are some clips that have been trialled by melbourne uni and were found to have too high a failure rate. Tha other alternative people are happy with is a medium to long term local anaesthetic to apply to the region first and then to perform the mulesing as per usual, but the time to kick in is too long and the length of effectiveness is too short.

It is a bad habit but if you have ever seen fly blown sheep or anyhthing for that matter you realise how distressing it is, so until they can breed the right genetics into the sheep they will most likely have to keep mulesing, I hope they spread the genes quicker but people have to be realistic.

this last bit may need to be moved to a different thread too, Nick