Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

so i've read that tilapia are herbavores, but has anyone tries feeding them worms? and if this works, does anyone compost their veggie matter directly into a section of their GB and farm the worms for fish food? I'm trying to think of an easy way to do this without having a separate compost pile outside. and an easy way to catch the worms.

i just found a nice post on the forum that gives me some more ideas....thx!

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4527&p=161244&hilit=tilapia+worms#p161244

I constructed a black soldier fly bin and used them to compost veggie scraps and cow poo.

My tilapia will eat them, but they seem to prefer smaller worms, veggies, and pellets. Now if I blend the worms then boil them and remove the fat and combine with veggies and dehydrate into flake food they go nuts for that.

The tilapia, especially when they were little, would eat just about anything they could get in their mouths and some things they couldn't. They were happy to eat bugs, worms, BSF larva, etc.

I don't know that trying to compost veggie waste in a grow bed is such a great idea unless you have an over abundance of grow bed space and are majorly understocked on fish. The additional load on the system might be too much. Also, an area of grow bed filled with rotting veggie scraps is likely to be too wet/waterlogged and become anaerobic which would not be so good for worm activity either.

Simply having a spot near your fish tank (well shaded of course since a worm bin in the sun gets way too hot) to have a worm bin for the veggie scraps would probably be pretty easy. Handy place to scoop out stems or uneated food from the fish tank to the worms and be able to grab worms for the fish. Worm bins are pretty easy, I can share lots of info about keeping worms is you like.

My tilapia love red worms. They suck them down like a kid eating spagettii. I grow my in standard worm beds and pull them out to feed the fish.

Has anyone figured out the square foot of worm space per gallon of fish tank etc. etc. ?

i have been feeding worms to my tilapia that i have in an aquarium and they love them it would seam.

i just put worms in the growbeds, no compost, i figure they eat any plant roots that get left behind when harvesting or they may eat dead leaves that sit on top of the gravel.

to harvest i place wet tonteen insulation fibre from the bio filter on the grow bed and over night the worms crawl into it.

Yep, noticed that myself... left a couple of filter mats that I changed out from the filter boxs.. on top of the growbeds...

Next day, picked them up and they were full of worms..

I've noticed if I place a flower pot with some compost in it on top of a grow bed, the worms tend to migrate into the compost making them quite easy to separate out.

Feeding 100% worms to tilapia might not be very good for the tilapia since the fat content I understand is a bit high. As Dan noted, there are ways to make fish food using worms but it's a bit more work.

Now if one wanted to incorporate a worm tray over a grow bed, there might be ways to deal with scraps and worms and incorporate the aquaponics but that would take away from the amount of space you get to use for the plants so it is probably easier to have your worm bin for scraps separate from the grow beds.