Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

It might not be easy to get off of pellets, but I'm pretty sure it's possible, you can do it for aquariums, even big reef tanks. And if you can't get completely off, supplementing is cheaper than not.

If you want cultures on anything you can feed to fish, aquabid has a pretty large live feed section, with reasonably knowledgeable buyers. Otherwise fleabay should have what you want.

cool thanks for the info.
yea ive thought about a bowl with cotton wool, then fabric on top (so spikey feet dont get caught on cotton wool) for watering of meal worms when my friend did them.

just using standard black crickets? know if the brown ones can be done the same (mole cricket)?


Thanks, ill likely just catch whatever from my backyard, pretty much everything listed can be found outside easily.

I have absolutely no idea what kind of cricket, I just bought some from the pet store, they're brown and chirp, got big black eyes. I feed them to praying mantises.

Yup! You could probably make do with a much smaller container too, ten gallon is just the size I've found. You should look at grindal, black, or white worms too, supposedly a culture will stay strong for years.

I've had good luck finding small glass aquariums for free or incredibly cheap on craigslist. Much better than plastic storage totes. Right now I've got a daphnia culture in a 10 or 15 gallon (not sure) tank, as well as two backup cultures in 5 gallon buckets. I haven't looked into raising much in the way of terrestrial critters as fish feed, mostly because I don't like the idea of using human-consumable foods (potatoes, carrots, etc) just to feed to insects that will be fish food. My black soldier fly bin takes care of our kitchen scraps and I don't feel like I'm "wasting" anything by tossing all the inedible stuff to the soldier fly grubs.

The grubs also eat fish that die off (if that happens) and they will eat fish offal as well including skins / scales.

We do occasionally have potatoes that go bad in our pantry, I might look at using that to feed to crickets but again I would feel silly buying human food just to avoid buying fish food.

On the subject of dietary completeness, I would imagine that feeding small fish (guppies, minnows, etc) to your omnivorous or piscivorous fish would provide an almost complete nutrient profile?

Feeding small fish and veggies and such would be for omnivorous. There aren't that many actually piscivorous fish, but yeah, guppies or fathead minnows (they are cold water egg layers, but they guard the eggs almost like cichlids) would be really easy maintenance.

But I feed the crickets mostly forage from my backyard. I feed daphnia greenwater and a yeast culture, so other than sugar and water... Feeding fish isn't that difficult if you really get a few different cultures of different critters going, it'll cost you right around eight extra bucks a month. And if you grow potatoes in soil with tank water, and worm leachate, it could be even cheaper.

I'm building my entire system off of free fishtanks from Craigslist. And fish too!

At this point I feed my daphnia some yeast and detritus (pinches of half-composted grass clippings), as well as soy flour. I bought a 50 pound bag of soy flour from amazon.com for about $65 shipped, and I blend a small scoop of that into warm water and pour it in. Soy flour is different from soy protein extract, the flour is simply ground up soybeans, and contains a more complete nutrient profile I believe.

I also poured enough granular agricultural lime (CaCO2 & MgCO2) to form a small pile on the bottom of the tank. From what I've read, daphnia love calcium concentrations as high as 250ppm and it helps them to build their carapace. They also like higher pH, 7.4-8.0 and the lime should buffer the water and keep it high.

Good to know! Thanks for the helpful info. I hear the best daphnia cultures are in ten gallon tanks with sponge filters running.

I'm also going to attempt a new "design" for daphnia cultures... basically the plan is to get more 10 to 40 gallon free or cheap aquariums and keep a rotation of daphnia going.

Consider aquariums A, B, C, D:

1. Green water added to tank A, B, C, and D.
2. Tanks A, B, and C are innoculated with daphnia.
3. Adult guppies are added to tank A
4. Guppy fry are added to tank B as they are born in tank A
5. Adults are harvested from tank A and fed to main system fish.
6. Fry in tank B are now grown to adults.
7. Daphnia are added to rich green water in tank D.
8. New fry produced by adults in tank B are added to tank C.

essentially the cycle continues by rotating between tanks, similar to how crop rotation works in dirt farming. Rather than keeping a tank full of daphnia and scooping them out, instead the idea is to prepare tanks with cultures of daphnia, then introduce predators (guppies) to eat them up. This eliminates the issue of the daphnia culture crashing because new daphnia cultures are always being started.

I'm hoping this will work because daphnia and guppies both like hard water, and higher-range pH

That's an awesome idea, though it does take a lot of space to get going. Then you feed the guppies to bigger fish!

Well, all my daphnia cultures crashed at the same time. I wonder if there was a parasite that got in or perhaps some environmental factor off'd them. I am going to leave the containers going and hopefully some daphnia produced "epiphhia" (eggs/cysts) before they died, which might hatch as the water quality level goes back to where they want it.

In other news, I found a great way to keep daphnia cultures aerated and filtered:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/181651858750?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

That type of filter only requires an air line and it helps to mix the water up, keeps mosquitos from landing and laying eggs by agitating the water, however the daphnia don't get sucked into the filter like if a pump was being used. I imagine that even though the sponges are quite small, they still have enough surface area to host nitrifying bacteria which actually are important in any culture larger than about 2 liters, because the daphnia are sensitive to nitrites and excessive levels of ammonia can halt their reproduction. Algae grows better as well, if the water is rich in nitrates.