Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Okay... well my system did not produce too good results... but I will try again shortly...
since they are about the only thing that survived my smaller chift pist style system by the side of my house...

Hi i am new to this and have just started to build a small system in Corrigin WA but i have had experience with yabby farming and here is some things about yabbies that i have observed, hope it might help. I did the yabby and marron course at Murdoch and they told us that they had opened the yabby up and researched its stomach contents (in order to be able to analyse it and make the right pellets) but they had absolutely no idea what constituted their diet as nothing was able to be recognised. They also told us that yabbies preferred still or very slow moving water and yabbies have a small grinding wheel in their stomach which they think is just left over as an unecessary part of their make up. this seemed like an awful lot of unanswered questions so i put some yabbies in a small fish tank and observed them (small things amuse small minds) and it dawned on me after a few fatalities and many hours looking looking that the reason that they cant work out what the yabby is eating is because they are composting a little pile next to their spot and using the grinding wheel to break things down for their compost heap (compost is unrecognisable as to what it comprised) and they are eating the microbial plants and animals that are in their heap. please dont give up on me just yet, so what is circulating around your aquaponics system is compost tea, which is good stuff. Also i observed the yabbies moulting on the edge of the dams i am guessing that it is either less dense in the air making the moult easier or the air hardens their shell quicker. no more space for writing

cont.... so it seems that the ideal environment for yabbies needs are, a brick or piles of bricks for climbing on so they can moult in air (more moult more growth) some gravel in the bottom for the females to hide their tails when they are berried ( they hide their tails with the babies, juveniles, and circulate their legs to keep the hole aerated) a spot for their compost heap, very slow moving water, algae, (for greens) not clear water, put some shadecloth on the top of the tank to slow the incoming water down, a piece of shadecloth scrunched up for the juveniles to settle on as they just float in the water column after being released from the mother, and feed them cut up things like broccoli leaves and stems, plants, worms, bugs, so they have compostable material. They only fight and be cannibalistic when the conditions are not right.(green potatoes will kill them). The biggest problem is they multilpy rapidly and you end up with a common denominator of small yabbies, you can either catch them with an opera house trap with shadecloth and bag them up and freeze them and sell fish bait bags or have one sex only tanks, the males grow bigger and faster than the females. another problem is if your pump is in their tank they wont be happy for all the above reasons so maybe you could have them in a separate tank with overflow into a sump tank, i am pretty sure that the same things apply for marron, hope this is some help dont give up on them Nocky, compost tea in your system is beautiful. Forgot, they love boiled eggs broken up, good for the calcium in your system.

Ruth you never run out of room for typing, just keep going, I had them for 18 months and have nothing but trouble, it is easier to get them from dams, even after I thought I got rid of them all, one blocks my pipe on the weekend

Hi Nocky i forgot to mention that they ate through my water pipe