Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Well, I now have a spirulina grow tank underway as an experiment. I set it up with 12V LED grow light strip and air pump inside an enclosed foam fruitbox. I got a 10L collapsible clear water drum from K-Mart to hold the grow media. I haven't used any heating other than heat from the electrics so I expect growth to be pretty slow until weather starts to improve, but I'm hoping to get some growth in the meantime. I have also ordered foam filters for a shrimp tank (not yet set up) which will come later. I tried netting the local lake for shrimp, but only caught and released a heap of baby galaxias. Again, I'll wait until things heat up a bit more in spring before trying again.

Looking forward to hearing how the algae grows for you. Some friends here were growing algae for biodiesel production. They used airstones as well and unless I'm mistaken they were using CO2.

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Yes Boss,
CO2 would certainly promote faster growth, especially once there are enough algae to utilise what's pumped in, but so far there are too few algae to make use of it. I just have a faint greeness (Is that a word?) in the water and don't even know yet whether it is a pure culture or a culture of rogue contaminants. I'm using an ayirstone to keep the media moving.
Time will tell.

An interesting article on this topic published today.

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-aquafeed- ... oalga.html

Apparently, (always a suspicious way to start a post ) chicken used to be an excellent source of omega three fatty acids, but due to our farming and feeding regimen(s), not so much any more unless you get them/grow them in a more traditional manner.

I have no idea about my source for this information other than it's lurking in the back of my head somewhere, which is why I started in the manner I did.

It's a funny thing that you can grow a chicken to "market size" on nothing but processed white rice, long before it dies of scurvy or something.

I'm guessing this means it's pretty much made of processed white rice, and the ingredients of air.

And maybe sunlight if it got any.

Garbage in / garbage out etc.