Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My winning guess is the waste is turning into magic mushies and filtering back into the fish tank, the fish are hallucinating and think the others are snapper with human faces telling silly jokes... and now for something completely different...

Okay, I've decided to give it till tonight before revealing the answer as so far these guesses have been hilarious! I've decided to make a second prize of 25 useless points for the funniest guess! Currently it looks like HairyCamel is winning that one. So get those guesses in! Answer revealed in 7.5 hours!

Did the waste start generating gas bubbles and flow away?

The waste does lift away from gas but the pile as a whole stays as new waste accumulates in its place. This was the whole pile over night!

Time to reveal the answer... but no winners this time. The culprit is this little guy! It escaped the sump compartment and found its naughty self in my settler. The crayfish has removed all solid waste and kept anything new from accumulating there. I have also witnessed it reach its claws through the holes and pinch the tails of unsuspecting Tilapia which then causes the fish to whip around and bite the next nearest fish! At one point there were several little fish squabbles the little bugger had started. Now about half of the Tilapia are sporting tattered tail fins from fighting constantly. Anyone want a crayfish?

You can always put him back in the sump.

Why not add more mesh and you have a cleaner so you don't have to clean out the settler that often? Not sure how you operate your settler so just throwing that out there.

Regards, Martin.

You'll have to award yourself all the points, what really happened is much funnier than the jokes.

What breed of cray is that, its has an oddly large carapace from what we see around here for that size specimen.

Martin, probably not a bad idea to screen off the top of his sump to keep him in place, I'll see if I can sort our a way to do that.
HairyCamel, I meant the 500 useless points! You definitely get the 25 points for funny. (I can't win my own game, sslike cheating!
Charlie, its a north American crayfish. They can be found in creeks and streams all around here. This one came from the pet shop though.I don't know the specific species but if I was gonna guess, it would be stinkerousminimus-p (sub phylum pincheroustilapious)

Hi JG, I meant put some extra mesh so that he can't shred the tails of the fish.

Ah, got it. With the amount of fish waste that comes through there I'd have to clean it every day atleast then. I'm way too lazy for that. Maybe an aquarium for just him with a little grow tray. Who knows.. Can a little crayfish support a micro ap system?

Ok JG, I see what you mean.

Good luck on the micro ap system. I saw Murray was doing one at one stage, I think it was called aquaponicals. They were quite cool looking things.

So it turns out my main filter pump burned out on me. That is three of those in two different fish tanks within 2 months of install. Marineland once was a great brand, now they sell over priced garbage. I won't make that mistake again. I have pumps that are supposedly the same model, ten years old and still running fine, these only lasted just until after their warranty period of 30 days. Pure garbage! You have all been warned! Marineland= garbage!

I have replaced the burn out pump with a cheepo China pump from the Hydro store. We will see how long it runs for. I did previously run it for 24 hours a day for about 2 months so, we will see.