Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Is this one the keeper and selling the first one? This one sounds like a lot more work to get it up and running.

yea, I need a keeper. with fish for eating. with leafy greens and beans.

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What fish are you going after? Gold fish have too many bones to pick thru to eat. Are you going to breed or buy?

With any luck, next week my new glass jugs should be here and I will try to pair off some Alien Minnows to breed. If they lay eggs there will be enough to do anything I want. They grow pretty fast for me. I want to set them up 50 to a grow bed in 100 Liter tanks and push them to the limit of minnow poo. I can keep adding them till I get what I am after. There is no short supply of them. They are everywhere here. I am hoping that once they are out of the monster tank they will settle down to making new minnows for us.

For now I will buy some tilapia fry. I'm going to try to grow duckweed to be significant portion of their diet. Dirt, O2, and compost tea oughta do it. My fish don't seem intetested in greens, so I'll stock the duckweed pond with them so mosquito's never make it out alive.
Goldfish may not be ideal, but I have heard koi is tasty.
Breeding may come later on. I need fish that can handle 80-95 degrees and easy to breed. Don't you have to grow a micro algae to feed tilapia fry? I'm also not worried about making conditions perfect for mating to occur naturally. I was shown by a friend in Texas how to spawn fish by hand. he did it these brown and tan african cichlids and then sold the fry to the pet store he was working at for ~15 percent what they were sold for.

How much is peanut oil in China? Try some deep fried minnow. typically an expensive treat.

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Bill, The only tilapia I have is over an inch long and it eats the new baby pellets I got. All the babies eat it and all the minnows eat it also. I changed over to this very small pellet to keep the tanks cleaner. The large pellets have some type of garbage in them that floats in the water and no one eats it. With the larger fish they take in the entire pellet so it never sees the inside in the tank. I still crush some of them to feed the shrimp. The crushed food sinks fast enough to get by all of the babies if they are munching on the small pellets. I have never eaten koi. I imagine they taste like carp. Carp is Ok if you don't mind the million hair sized bones in the meat. It is so difficult to eat, I usually pass on it. The other problem is carp can become pets. They can wiggle their way into your heart and it would be very difficult for me to cull mine for food.

We have lots of peanut oil in China. I have some in the kitchen right now. We usually have 3 types of oil all the time. Different foods like different oil for the taste. The large 5 liter bottles can cost around 100 to 120 rmb. I prefer it to the other oils here.

If you are talking about milking the fish, that is some task in front of you. It can be done with egg bearing fish and I think all trout is done that way. If you can get a couple to mate, then just let mother nature take over and they will get around to it. I will see what happens to the minnows. Maybe add a little Barry Manalo music for them and a privacy cover. No mating is going on in the large tank so far. If so every thing is getting eaten. I have seen no new lady fish with extended pouches. I did catch one that looked rather full at the time but I think the gold fish ate the eggs.

I never fed any fry this micro algae you mentioned. Only fed fry crushed powder from pellets. They all ate it and survived well. I use a mortar and petal to grind food. The powder gets really fine in it. Like dust if you want. I am not going to try and eat the minnows unless we breed them up for food. It is hard enough catching them by hand. If I had several thousand of them, maybe.

Nice, peanut oil is my favorite.
I don't plan on breeding minnows to eat, and my fish are too small to spawn by hand. I'm going to find out if newly hatched tilapia can eat the powdered food. I don't see why not.

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Won't the newly born tilapia fry spend most of their time in moms mouth and she feeds them somehow. If baby guppies would eat the powder I guess they will also. My 1 inch baby ate the small pellets from day one and also munches on crushed food when I use that. The pellets I got this time are very small, less then the diameter of a toothpick. Yet they float and even the smallest of babies picks one out and holds it in its mouth till it is soft and then gulped down. That takes about 3 minutes. With so many minnows I like the fact that everyone gets fed. They all hit the pellets on the surface and take it down to crew on. The gold fish take big mouthfuls. I am hoping my new larger jugs come in tomorrow as promised.
I am hoping to get something that lays eggs so I will have many of something. 30,000 snakehead babies would be cool too. They are really good to eat so I am told and read.

tilapia fry are smaller than guppy fry. but from what I've read powdered food will feed them.


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Ok, what happens in the wild when they are in moms mouth, do they pick off food from her mouth? If they are smaller then guppy fry then I would need to change to a sponge filter. They would get sucked into the air one I use.

I pulled the wheat today. I think it was taking up too many nutes.

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I had always assumed that they are in yolk-sac absorption phase while in the mouth and then start venturing out of the mouth to seek powder-sized food after the yolk-sac is absorbed. Tilapia are well-studied fish. I'll bet the definitive answer is out there...

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Sam

If you mean that when the eggs hatch they carry a bit of it around with them. Ok, lots of fish can do that and it would give them the extra time needed for eating and growing. I would guess that moms mouth will be a good chewed up feeding ground for them. They suck them in right from birth and keep them there for a log time. It may look like all the babies are gone. So weaning them off this provided food to pellet powder is the question. How long would that take or do they need a different food to eat. It did work well with guppies right from day 1. Since I only have 1 of them I guess I have a long time to wait to see for myself. We did go back looking for more and came back empty handed. I can buy full sized fish if needed. No idea on the sex yet. I would need to figure that out when getting them. So unless we can find more babies this one will grow up a loner.

No, the yolk-sac is a little different than a bit of the egg from which they hatched being carried around:





Even human embryos go through a stage where they've got a yolk-sac:



Eventually it gets incorporated into a primitive gut.

Several sites seem to confirm that Tilapia fry leave the mouth after yolk-sac absorption after which they are no longer called yolk-sac fry and are called swim-up fry. While they may return to the mouth for a few days for protection, they for the most part are on their own after leaving the mouth.


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Sam

Yeah Sam that's what I meant. It looks like mom has no role in their feeding like I thought. Just security. Hey mom, don't swallow right now, It would be like living in an instant death trap if she did. Crazy fish. Has to be cool to watch them. I hope I get the chance some day. Thanks for the research info.

I'll second that, tilapia may be a good choice after all

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