Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Does anybody know if tropical Aquatic Aquarium plants will work.

What I mean is, if I have a grow bed that always stays full and is growing aquariums plants and mosses will the aquatic plants take out the Nitrate in the water?

I am wanting to farm some aquatic plants.

They will take nitrate out of the water, but your planting densities are usually low enough that it won't matter much.

I've been trying to find some Chinese watercress for a long time :/

Aquatic Plants I'm sure can be grown in Aquaponics. You may still need some regular grow beds or some other method to take care of your bio and solids filtering needs.

Are you just wanting to grow some Aquatic plants as an offshoot of a regular AP system or are you hoping for a system with only aquatic plants?

After final treatment in a treatment plant, human sewage water is being treated for a final time through constructed wetlands before being released into waterways or recaptured for recycled water. Water hyacynth is great for trapping small solids, is fast growing and once wilted a little to remove excess water, can be fed to cows, pigs and chickens. Bog plants would be excellent as they like their feet wet but the tops dry and totally submerged aquatic plants would be no different than the same plants kept in a fish stocked aquarium with a florescent grow light. I raised tropical fish for decades and had a few of the larger tanks decorated with aquatic plants.
Be careful though that you check your plants over well. Once I got a water plant and then a month or so later, I had something eating my feeder fish and just leaving the head. I found out later that a dragonfly larvae had cocooned himself within the leaves and came out at night to feed. Before he got big enough to eat my fish, he was probably eating the blood worms that were growing in the gravel (it was a community tank of varying species). It was about three inches long before I found it.

Angie how big to dragonfly larva get?

I'm not sure- I don't even know what species of dragonfly larvae I had but it looked absolutely alien and it did have small lobster like claws. The funny thing is that I bought my plant at a pet store and it looked fine and healthy- didn't see the predator within but like I said it had wrapped leaves around itself and was well hidden. It just couldn't hide anymore as it grew faster than my plant did and of course, I knew something else (besides the fish I was feeding) was killing my feeder goldfish.

According to this article, the larvaes are also canibals- usually it's the adults that prey on the young, not the reverse!!!

As the dragonfly larvae grow larger, they are able to overpower larger and larger insects and even small fish and other aquatic animals. They will kill others of their own kind, and nymphal dragonflies have been seen to catch and destroy adults in which the wings were not yet expanded.
http://www.critterzone.com/magazinereso ... nflies.htm

Here is a picture of the nasty thing with it's claws extended.
http://www.critterzone.com/magazinereso ... nflies.htm

Sorry wrong link....it's a black and white sketch but you get the idea.

http://www.kenwildman.com/insects.htm

Hi All,
When we used to go trout fishing in the Snowy Mountains area in NSW, we used to rely on Dragonfly Larvae for bait. Trout loved em!
We call them 'Mud Eyes" and they can grow up to 75 to 80 mm long, but bait size was about 25mm long.
Ugly little buggers, but they must taste good, to trout anyway.

Cheers IanK

Some types of dragon Fly can get really huge too. I have seen a few down here in FL with wing spans bigger than a large human hand and the body makes me thing they could easily take on fingerlings as food while in their nymph stage.

The goldfish this thing was snagging averaged 2". I had two huge voracious oscars that ate about 20 a piece per day- I had to switch them to pellets because it got so expensive to maintain all the fish that we had. We were already buying small rats for our Arowana, flakes for the smaller tropicals and blood worms for the exotic freshwater eels and we had plenty of other fish that ate goldfish.

I under stand they prefer to lay their eggs in moving water over still water, kind of like what we have in ap. Seems like it would be hard at all to get those suckers in our systems.

Boy, I hope not. We have gorgeous red and black ones that are huge!!! We also have the smaller electric blue ones. I see them land occasionally on my water iris and umbrella plants but I haven't seen any sign that they are laying in the pond but it is still water and I have a single medium size goldfish in there (the last of 15 tiny, tiny feeder goldfish). Maybe that is why some of them disappeared??? I never did find any bodies except for a few when we had a serious heat wave for a few weeks. I thought the cats might have gotten them, now maybe not.
I already have to worry about snakes, cats and water fowl snagging my fish and ground squirrels, cottontail rabbits and my own ducks and geese getting the plants- now I might have to worry about those dragonfly larvae. I didn't even think about them being a problem until this forum brought it to mind from my aquarium days.