Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have a bunch of Silver Perch fingerlings in my six foot fish tank inside at the moment and they are growing at a crazy rate, maybe half of them would be about five times bigger than the rest already and I've only had them for around three weeks.
These bigger fish hog all the food and will just keep eating as much as I put in, they have big round bulging bellies!
Is it possible to overfeed and kill them? or will they get to a point where they will have enough and stop eating?

Cheers

Shaun

Hi Shaun - when people kill their fish by overfeeding it is normally due to water quality problems rather than the fish dying from eating too much. Having said that - you can certainly feed your fish more than the optimum amount.

For your problem what I would do is invest in a larger pellet for the larger fish. Feed that larger pellet first and then follow up with the smaller pellet once they have had their feed. I think you will find that this way the smaller fish will get a go. In commercial operations fish are graded frequently when small. In backyard operations like ours that is generally not viable unless you are running multiple tanks. At least with silvers the larger fish will not eat the smaller ones - unlike barra for instance.

What size pellet are you using and how big are you bigger silvers?

Yep, give a larger pellet to the larger fish... and follow with the current feed as VB suggests..

I put 100 silvers and 100 catties fingerlings in a seperate tant (800Lts) that has my main FT water cycling through it. This was about 3 weeks ago. I find that the silvers will eat all of the food and the catties go hungry. To solve this, I wet the pellets and pound them into a paste. I then roll it into balls and drop it in the tank where it sinks to the bottom and I have watched all of the fingerlings getting a feed (rolling the balls around on the flat bottom of the tank). It works so well that I have frozen some balls for my misses to feed them next week as I will be away on business. I have also encluded some chopped pilchard in the mix - which they love .

My catfish are the first ones to take the floating pellets. The silvers have a hard time getting through the catfish blanket to get to the food. Once the catfish are in a frenzy I toss some more food away from them so the silvers get a chance.

Yeah. I found that the lot befor this the catties fed from the top but this lot seem to prefer the bottom. I also keep the tank covered with black plastic, maybe that has changed their feeding habit.

The larger ones are only around 30mm long and the smaller ones near half in length but about a fith in size.
I'm feeding them crushed up fish pellets, frozen brine shrimp and frozen blood worms 3-5 times a day but every time you go near the fish tank they swim to the top looking for more food.
I'm not really worried too much about the smaller ones, I'm just going to put the bigger stronger fish into my system once it is up and running.