Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Sorry about the losses, but they are beautiful! Good luck with them!

*Gazing into the crystal ball, my hands circling over as it begins to glow* What is this? It looks to be a 500 gallon tank in your future..... you are filling it with 8 inch Tilapia....many of them. And there are smaller tanks around you filled with fry and fingerlings....and you are wearing rubber boots and the floor is soaking wet...

...Sun room is filling with water....Janet has waterproofed it up to 3ft, (90cm)....it is now just another tank....She is doing a MF to her sunroom to get more light in....The contractor that has been called for the extension on her home shakes his head in disbelief....

I feel like kindred spirits Janet. I too have lost almost 30 fish now. But tey will reproduce and quickly. No worries there.

It's really strange, here the give you bags with no seams and very thick. and that is just to take it dwon the road a bit. (couple of hours) Seems that they could have done a better job of packing. And what in the world did FedEx do to bust the bags like that. It must have gotten run over! Good luck on the compensation.

oooo, don't tempt me. I think about the skylights on a regular basis.

I'm debating going to get a few pounds of salt. I didn't want to salt, but I also expected to receive both fish -and- water in my box.

Oh, I can tell exactly what happened, DT. The fish were flown. Correctly packed and shipped, that would be fine. However, the bags had too much air in them for the changes in air pressure that they experienced. They popped like balloons at the weakest point--the seam. What I can't tell is whether the problem was in the shipping or the packing. The packer should have left some slack in the bags when he put in oxygen. The shipper should have provided a properly pressurized environment. It wasn't run over since the outer styrofoam box was intact. It was dropped or up-ended since the outer box was wet. Kinda a complicated series of events, but the evidence is all there. Pop, drop, slop.

heh you puttting that in the report? Haha. I really hope it all comes out well for you.

HS, HS, HS! Gosh Janet What a drama for you! At least you got to weigh and measure some of them easily. (Alex fed our two DOA's to the chickens so quickly, they didn't get measured)

I got to see if I could sex them, too. No luck visually. I could see two openings on all of them, but not a third. I didn't try the grass stem trick. They're still pretty small.

Update: They are incredibly hungry things. The water boils when I toss a bit of food in. They are almost large enough to take the pellets I put in for the goldfish. I reached in to adjust the heaters (they like the heaters), and got tasted a few times. That's gonna be a real suprise when they get bigger. I still suspect that I'm going to lose a few more in the next day or two, but things are looking better.

what temp are you keeping the water? Also on the sexing, there is no third opening. one is dark and the other is fainter. on the females the dark spot is closer to the head and the male the dark spot is closer to the tail.

Janet. It's a miracle any of them survived that treatment. Tilapia must be a super tough fish. You have done an amazing job rescuing them. People ship live fish by air all the time, your mob must be new to it maybe? Maybe the softly softly approach would go well in this situation. You never know, you may have been their first delivery and they will be upset you lkost a lot too, they will probably offer to send you another 100 fish LOL

Then you would have a mess on your hands....you might have to pull out the chain saw and remodel.

DT,
I have the temp up to about 80F/25C now. I'd like to go a touch warmer, but I am going to take that more slowly. As for dark spots and light spots, what I can see is a larger spot closer to the head, and a smaller spot closer to the tail. Of the half dozen I looked at, I didn't see variation to that pattern. They are pretty small. Things will become clearer, I'm sure.

Monya,
I'm not angry over this at all. I'm finding some humor from it, actually. I would be very happy if they would not ship another batch, but would only charge me for the fish that are still swimming tomorrow morning. The company is more accustomed to shipping huge numbers by air, and you pick them up at the airport. They have apparently had problems with Fedex before. I still haven't spoken with the owner, but can hopefully reach him tomorrow.

All in all, I think this shows very well how tough these fish are. I am a little concerned that I'll have fungus in a week from the stress, but I guess we'll just wait and see. ATM there are a couple fish that are flashing, and a few more resting on the bottom. I'm worried about them. The rest are swimming well, fins fully engaged with no clamping or gulping, eating like pirahnas, and are not attempting to leap out of the water. (They were attempting flight during acclimiting when the ammonia was 3.)

Well now....let me tell you how to deal with fungus......

Rubs hiis hands together finally having something to contribute..... But wait, all I know I learned from Janet! Oh well.....