Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I've been thinking a lot lately about what kind of fish I'd like to culture for food and there is one that I keep coming back to...

I have been keeping and breeding tropical cichlids for the last 25 years and my favourite has to be the oscar (Astronotus ocellatus). In South America they are an aquaculture mainstay. In the past I have kept oscars in a 6x2x2 tank and I bought them at about 2" from an aquarium store and they grew to a bit over 10 inches and a little over 700g in 11 months. They don't have intramuscular bones (pin bones) and they eat a wide variety of foods, will get along ok with other oscars, can be bred easily, have large spawns and will look after their babies in their inital growth stages. It is cheap and easy to buy brood stock and their flesh is meant to have nice mild flavour, be firm and white that dresses out quite well too. Their water needs to be heated, but I think that wouldn't be too much of an issue. They are filthy pigs so maybe the plants in an aquaponics setup would love them. Tilapia are a popular aquaculture species that is illegal here in Australia and belong to a group of fish known as cichlids. Oscars too belong to this group and are perfectly legal. They are pan sized and shape, and if you get red oscars as brood stock then they look attractive too. I would love to try them for the table some time. There is next to no information out there about people farming oscars for food but the more I think about it the more interested I get lol.

YUM!

See my post regards Tilapia! (Legal in WA!)

Might have some bearing on what you want to do with Oscars!

Oscars are ferocious fish too..... And I've seen them survive some absolutely shocking water conditions, a little like goldfish.

You might want to try eating one first though OzV, before you go stocking up with lots and lots of them....

This is not really true... well I guess it depends what your perspective is. I have kept them with all kinds of cichlids and they are by far the least ferocious of all the larger cichlids. I use to keep them with severums and chocolate cichlids because they couldn't handle being kept with the other big guys I had. Compared to my festae or jags that I have kept these guys are tame. I had an Australian Bass in there with them for a time (a temporary boarder) and it was much meaner than any oscar I've ever seen. I guess if you were a goldfish or a neon tetra an oscar would seem ferocious. In actual fact oscars will cohabit readily with other oscars and similar sized fish in highly stocked circumstances without confrontation (unless they decide to spawn). I had two oscars, one 6 inches long and the other 10 inches long in with a pair of convict cichlids both three inches long and the convicts spawned, as they do (just add water), and they ripped into the oscars and tore a bit of skin off the side of the 6" oscar the size of a fifty cent piece, and had the 10" oscar pinned in the corner such was their ferocity (I have photographs of it on my other computer somewhere - I didn't think he would live, but he did - a tribute to the tenacity of the oscar - I have a theory on that too - the natural habitat of the oscar is the Amazon River and there are plenty of larger meaner fish in there that will eat them or injure them - like piranha - so they had to evolve amazing recouperative powers so that if they were injured in an attack they need to be able to heal quickly from serious injuries or end up dinner somewhere down the track - everything that I have seen so far seems to support this idea too). The convicts are the original homicidal axe wielding murderers. I put my hand in the convict spawning tank once and the male swam up and grabbed my knuckle and bit me tearing a chunk of skin off causing me to bleed lol.

But yeah - I would like to try the oscar on the plate before trying to culture them. They have a good reputation but there's nothing like first hand experience. Was thinking also of giving some to a local restaurant to prepare and evaluate to see how they stack up as a food fish. That would be really interesting...

Festae rok the caz bar but Jacks rule the roost and choclates are sooks heh.
I have eaten oscar from dams, wasn't a bad tasting fish.
Certainly not as tasty as a moonlight gourami or a clown loach but ya not bad.
The trick is getting a pair that reliably raises fry.. then you have all the oscar you could ever want.

I always found oscars to just be eternally hungry, but not mean. They would eat anything they could get their mouth around. It annoyed husband to no end when one swam around for several days with the tail of his favorite eel sticking out of its mouth. The eel was too long to swallow all the way.

I do see references that oscars are considered edible, but also that they grow slowly so may be unsuited for aquaculture. I didn't think mine grew that slowly, but I wasn't tracking things.

Yeah, it was an easy jump for me to go to tilapia. My favorite aquarium fish are cichlids (gold severums are the best!)

Yeah, a bunch of our "aquarium species" are apparently pretty good eating and are eaten in the home countries.
-Clown Loaches
-tinfoil barbs
-RTC's
And a bunch more i cant think of atm...breeding for some if not all of the above is probably impractible/impossible for the average fish keeper

Oscars however are aparrently pretty easyto breed, and they can survive lower temps than alot of cichlids....

Oscar I ate tasted as good as the barra that were in the dam... like dam fish lol
But they were a lot of fun to catch out again with rods.
You do need to breed your own to eat tho, most in trade will have been kept in wholesaler medicated tanks and stuff
The asians are breeding clown loaches a lot now, espec in thailand. Be hard to get brood stock here anyway.
But ya tasty fish, very oily... like a marine fish. Lotsa dishes based around them.
For aquaponics I would say moonlight gourami would be the go. They are medium tough to the cold but very tough to the rest.
Smaller fish but I bet you could breed easy enough.
I have raised oscars before.... had to the parents were hopeless lol
You have to feed them food a lot of times a day.
I reccomend breeding life food up, maybe a pond or 2 of greenwater as well as fry foods.
but ya get a good pair and you are laughing
then you move a log or something and they sook for 6 months

So how big will a moonlight gourami really get. Aquarium references say 6 inches (150mm), and I don't think that's big enough for good eating.

I'd say they are a wee bit bigger than that but ya something around there.
Once again it's a case of everything having a drawback and for these guys size is the drawback. People do farm to eat but ya they also eat dried prawn heads so ya different tastes

Doesn't really sound practical. Seems it would be better to invest your time in something you can sink your teeth in.

Having sunk my teeth into a fair few of them I can but say that they are eaten by a lot of people.
Lotta recipe for them, sometimes involving roller pinning the fish until the bones are crushed.
Anyway a common fish to have in a creek chicken wired in an thrown veggie scraps in some places in asia.
some sorta big gourami could be more suitable tho eh.
Just thought would suggest, as ya not a good size fish to sell.... but if survival was the game they could work with smaller setups.... then again you could go catch a few handful of gambusia instead lol

So, has anyone here tried aquaculturing oscars yet? I'm new here, just posted the other day looking for tilapia. I've been looking for tilapia in small quantity and price for awhile now, and have just about given up. Raising aquarium oscars was actually my 'Plan B'.

As to their growth rate, I believe it's actually highly variable, according to the specific variety, tank conditions (they grow much faster in clean water), and/or probably just genetics. However, I've seen lots of anecdotal information indicating that they often grow at least an inch per month up until about 8-10" (ie, eating-size). Some people have seen more than 2" per month.

There seem to be indications that oscars and tilapia will get along with each other in a mixed tank ... if anything, tilapia are actually more aggressive. Maybe I'll try both.

I would say (having raised both separately) that tilapia are more aggressive than oscars, but I would guess that they would get along fine as long as they are similar size.

Wow! I'd thought of them but thought people would think I was mad!

I like the idea of fish that I can breed at home and I don't mind heating.
DH also wants a 'nice' fish to look at. I showed him the SP and he thinks they are boring but he does like the Oscars and I've always wanted to get some as I think they are beautiful.

If other people have/do eat them I'd like to try some.