Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have breed Mozambique tilapia in captivity with considerable success in the past. I have moved away from tilapia in north texas because of the temperature requirements and have begun using native fish more and more.
Based on BG being every bit the food chain backbone as tilapia I figure that bluegill should be just as easy to spawn in captivity. This is an account of my first attempt. My triumphs and mistakes.

Originally I put 4 bluegill into a 100 gallon aquarium in January of this year. The intention was to have 1 male and 3 female and I sorted as best as I could based on ear tab size and shape and what little I know about blue gill coloring (which doesn’t really exist in January only in mating season)
The “male” (bluegill #A) immediately staked out territory using his tail to dig out a nest. He was very aggressive towards the other fish and I found it necessary to break up the tank by adding terra cotta pots to let the other fish keep out of line of sight. There was not a lot to report as far as mating behavior.

In may, I figure that something should have happened by now so I started researching and the best recommendation I saw was to put the aquarium light on a 16 hour a day timer to simulate long summer days. This seemed to trigger a fair amount of mating behavior but no actual spawning or eggs.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed one of the other bluegill (bluegill #B) digging out a small nest between the terra cotta pots (away from the dominant male) and seemed to be courting bluegill #C. I found this curious so I removed the bluegill #A and bluegill #B immediately took over the main nest.
A few days later I captured the bluegill getting goovy (but no eggs)




and about a week later eggs appeared in the nest.


Come to find out I had two males and the female bluegill #C for some reason didn’t want to mate with bluegill #A, she seemed to prefer bluegill #B.

3 days later I had thousands of fry.

The tilpaia fry are much much bigger and i am able to get them on powdered commercial feed and algae waffers as soon as the fry sack is absorbed.

I was a bit surprised at how small the bg fry are. Apparently they eat microbial life like protozoa and algae at this stage and i dont have any algae blooms ready.

again, there are thousands, maybe 10's of thousands of mouths to feed.

brian

Well done

Try using spirulina powder.
That's what I used on my egg scatterer fry.

Congrats on the spawn, the hard part will probably be getting them to 3cm

Thanks for the recommendation, I will try it.

I have already had a mass dieoff in my aquarium.

I did manage to relocate an unknown number of fry to an outdoor algae bloomed IBC tote but i have no idea how many or how many are still alive right now.

I will definately try again but maybe not til next year when my feed trained redear sunfish are big enough to reproduce. I am going to attempt to BG x RE and RE X BG cross that should make a mostly male faster growing / larger fish than the parents.

brian

Good job. That is such a great looking sight to see.

For Tilapia, what is your water temp?

Zubin,

I have had successful tilapia spawns at any temp betwene 70 and the low 90's. You could probably have successful spawns in the high 90s but those temps are going to start being stressful to the tilapia and the fry.

Brian

when the temps are above.. i think 98f, you'll have mostly male fry? i know i read about this somewhere.. but i can't find it at the moment

Keith,

I remember RS talking about trying this method during a visit to his system. I think i have seen it on a forum but dont recall when/where.

IIRC there was some debate if the temp caused them to change to male or it just caused a high mortality of female.

brian

yeah, i seem to remember that..
my plans are in flux.. harvesting 20 or 30 tilapia this weekend, and when it cools down i'll probably harvest the rest of the fish..you've got me reconsidering getting more bluegill.. i've found hybrid striped bass, or trout fairly close for this fall..

Keith,

What would your plans be for bluegill? raise them to fingerling as supplemental/live feed or to raise?


This was just my first try with straight bluegill. I plan to use what i learn to do a BGxRES cross and hopefully crappie assuming i can get a few feed trained.


brian

Looks like you've done some good work there. I'm interested to see how it all turns out.

i was thinking more along the lines of supplemental feed for whatever i happen to be growing.., but allowing some to grow out to eat..i love me some bluegill fried in bacon grease!
i just have to figure out where to put a few more glass tanks

Just realized i never updated this thread. I lost all of these bluegill eventually. I lost 99% of them in the 1st week to starvation. I was able to salvage about 50 of them into a greenwater ibc i had in my back yard but ended up feeding those to other fish when moving water around between systems.

I have some feed trained red ear sunfish and i still have the bluegill male, The plan is still to try again next spring and to try to do the BGxRES cross for hybrid vigor


brian

In 2014 i have a couple of goals to build off of last years bluegill spawn

1) keep the larva alive and grow them into feed trained juveniles
2) cross RESxBG or BGxRES


I have set up some Bg and RES in my 100 gallon aquarium, set the light to 16 hours on 8 off and added an aquarium heater to bring the water up to and maintain it at 78 degres. it would usually stay at about 70. I will probably post some pictures so i can get you guys to help verify i have male BG;s and female res.. or i may need to swap some fish around to make better breeding pairs.

meanwhile, in my 60 gallon aquarium where i am keeping only feed trained res, one of the res males built a nest and today i noticed some eggs/larva in his nest.


The big male RES is the one closest to the nest and kind of facing me, I think the other 5 or 6 fish are all female res but i am not sure. He seems to always face me like i am a threat.


The nest


a closeup of the eggs. they are moving and jumping around but not swimming.


as for keeping the larva alive this time i have a multi-pronged approach where i keep some in different tanks and try different approaches.
1) I am moving some aquaponics water into a 100 gallon stock tank outside. Hopefully it has time to algae bloom a little before the larva start swimming.
2) I acquired some spirulina powder. I plan to try to get them to eat this.
3) i bought a mixture of daphnia, fairyshrimp and clamshrimp eggs a few months ago. I am going to get that culture started today so i can add zooplanton.