Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My parents have a vacation house on Cayuga lake in upstate New York. We fish off the dock and commonly catch and release a couple dozen 5-7" yellow perch every day. It's great fun for the kids, but frustrating to keep throwing back all those delicious perch because they're too small to bother filleting. The fishery must be way out of balance with very few mature perch. Daily catch limit is 50 with no minimum size. So I was thinking of corralling some in the spring in a net pen, and growing them out to maturity in the fall. I'm thinking of a 20' diameter, 4' deep net pen in shallow water so they can feed naturally. Supplement with some fish chow when we're around, but mostly let them forage naturally and fatten up to a pound and a half or so. Do you think this would work? Is it legal?

Hi twd000

Cecil at apn grows YP (and other species) in netpens & ponds
http://aquaponicsnation.com/forums/topi ... ic-papers/
http://aquaponicsnation.com/forums/topi ... the-ponds/

cheers

Probably be a good idea to make sure it's legal in your state to do this first.

I'm looking online for regulations, but the only thing I see is related to bait fish (not planning on using them for bait) and transporting them across state (which I won't be doing). I'll essentially be operating a mini grow out operation in the same body of water in which they were caught. I'm sure it's illegal to discharge a recirculating aquaculture operation into the lake, but that's not really what I'm proposing....

2 things im thinking of....

going from a whole lake to a pen of 7m wide, do you think they will still get enough food to thrive when not fed by you?

you say you would place it in the shallows, this makes it hard for them to hide from birds and you are likely just going to doom them to be bird food.

not a bad idea, but i would think about how they will get food and how you can protect them from predators, on top of the legal issues.

Good points. As far as the depth, the pen would be at the same depth as I'm catching them. Essentially as far as I can cast from the dock. So if they are feeding in that area, they must feel some protection from predators.

I'm open to any suggestions on stocking density. I know they hit minnows and worms pretty aggressively

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Would not be all that hard adding a bird netting top to a pen to stop predation..
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