Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Just my way of being doubly sure...
If there are sharp stones under and any stones over
there is the possibility they can clash...

With the first of my commercial sites coming on stream and set to produce tons of Tilapia, my home system seems to be a bit of a waste of time to grow out fish so I have decided to convert it into a hatchery. Now in order to make this work, a couple of challenges presented themselves. Firstly, temperature. To stand any chance of breeding Tilapia year round, some form of heating the water in Winter is necessary.

The outside pond temperatures are plunging to 12 deg and lower at night and I lost most of my red Tilapia in these temperatures. Funnily enough my plain Tilapia female brood fish were unaffected. Anyway heating was vital and so I took the plunge and installed a heatpump.

With this pump I can heat the water to 28 degrees but this requires running it 24/7 which is not only expensive but also impractical as I run my entire system on a timer, so some compromises were required. After playing around with the timings of my flood and drain system I have now been able to get the temperatures to 20 degrees at night and 24 during the day. This will be a very temporary measure as the ambient temperatures rise from now on and I should achieve the 28 degrees I am looking for easily.

My second challenge was space. My little greenhouse is only 6m x 3m and is crammed with two big tanks and lot's of pumps and a large bank of strawberry towers. I decided that I was going to use my transport tank as the honeymoon suite as it is getting rather rusted and old for transport purposes. So the answer? You guessed it, "off with it's head."

Using an angle grinder I cut of the top third of the tank leaving a great 700L breeding tank.

The strawberry towers were also presenting a problem. Firstly, next time I make some (and I will be making hundreds at my current commercial site) I will use a thicker pipe. 80mm is just too thin. I recommend a minimum of 110mm to make them practical. Secondly a pre-filter is vital as they clog easily and become quite unsightly with fish poo dripping down the sides. I wanted to keep my strawberry towers but where could I find the space? The answer? "Off with their heads." I shortened them to fit over the new tank, cleaned them up, filled them with new gravel, installed a pre-filter, replanted the strawberries and plumbed the new tank in with the strawberry towers dripping directly into the tank providing the inflow water. Voila !!

You may notice from the image that I use an outside standpipe to determine the water level. I planted some water plants and tomorrow I'll get the aeration going with a big airstone.

We travelled through to Stellenbosch University near Cape Town (round trip 1200km) to fetch some fingerlings for a client on Thursday and while I was there I decided to pick up 15 brood males for myself as my 50 brood females are getting mighty lonely.

I am keeping the males and females separate in my two mesh tanks.

In about a week when the water clears and they're good and horny from the increased temperatures, I'll introduce 2 males and 8 females to the new honeymoon tank and let the party begin.

Cheers

Some more images.

The Tilapia brood fish that I have been conditioning have started to spawn. At this stage I am merely scooping the hatched babies from the surface and putting them into a 600mm fry tank which I initially placed in the greenhouse, but that has proved to be a LITTLE too hot. For future reference, Tilapia babies can survive 40 deg, I kid you not. Getting home from the farm on Friday I was horrified to see the temperature in the fry tank. (See image attached, shock and horror.)

I immediately siphoned off most of the hot water and moved the tank out of the greenhouse to a safer spot on my deck where the babies seemed quite happy. They are like little eating machines.

I have now decided to try and hatch the eggs in an incubator. Today I collected some eggs (this isn't really rocket science, it just involves chasing the females around until they spit out their eggs) I've had no luck getting them to spit out eggs by dunking their mouths in a bucket of water.

Then I proceeded to build an upwelling incubator. I am hoping that the downward force of the water will gently turn and oxygenate the eggs until they hatch, whereafter they will exit via the overflow pipe. I'll keep you posted.

My home system is also producing a steady stream of fruit and vegetables. I have been particularly lucky with strawberries, mint, gooseberries, lettuce and various herbs.

40

Gotta love them moments

I will be very interested to see how the eggs do in your incubator! I am wanting to do something like this to ensure higher survival rate as by the time I notice the tiny fry most of them have already been eaten by the other fish.

We wait and see. I'm scooping about 30 eggs a day out of the brood tank. Who know's if they're fertilised or not. Time will tell. I first saw the idea at Stellenbosch University here in South Africa and took a sneak photograph with my cell phone (see attached)

Heres a simular idea from barrel ponnics site in usa

Thats a much larger container for the eggs than the test tube looking things I have seen. I hope the water is rolling the eggs

If you mean my bucket system, yes, the eggs are getting rolled around the bottom. When the flow is set correctly they get pushed against the side with the force of the water and roll up and down the sides. I can see already that although the size of the bucket is fine a rounded conical bottom would be better as they'd then always roll towards the flowing water.

Cheers

Learning lots on your thread S. Thank you.

My first batch of Tilapia babies (they were named batch # 08/10A) have grown like crazy and have become totally conditioned to feeding times. I am using normal Tilapia Starter food from a company called AquaNutro and merely crush the pellets into a powder and then feed them to the fish.

I have had limited success collecting random eggs from the brood tank and hatching them in my home-made incubator so the events of yesterday really put my incubator to the test. In moving some fish around yesterday a female coughed up literally a thousand eggs and very small fry with egg sacs still attached. We quickly went into action and moved batch# 08/10A into a newly prepared mesh pond where they will grow for a few weeks before being moved out to one of the farms.

We then carefully netted off the new batch #08/11A and put them into the fry tank. The eggs I placed into the incubator and was surprised to find them all hatched out overnight. Temperatures in the fry tank and the incubator are both 28 deg.

Attached some action shots.

I now have a good system going and will move the fish between various tanks as they grow and then move them out to the farms when they are about 40mm long.

Cheers

Wow - I wish silver perch would do that by themselves.

Excellent work Synaptoman!

And so it begins Synapto.... a well deserved outcome... you've put mucho effort into that system.... congrats on your parenthood....