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Comment by Dave & Yvonne Story on November 10, 2011 at 11:27pm

Sexing:

One of my classmates is a visiting scholar from the Philippines. He sexed my fish for me today. WOW!  That was interesting to watch, everything from calming the fish to feeling for the organ. From the outside they all looked the same to me, out of 42  fish 14 were female. As has been mentioned on here, he said it is not 100% accurate.

Comment by TCLynx on November 10, 2011 at 8:32am

Perhaps some netting (be sure to choose some type the fish won't get tangled in though.)

Comment by Jon Parr on November 10, 2011 at 8:00am

Good idea about the mats. Or maybe use ropes. I've seen picture of seaweed farms that float lengths of rope near the surface. Once they are thick with algae, put them in the fish tank and let the tilapia graze, return them to the algae tank before they are stripped too clean.

Comment by TCLynx on November 10, 2011 at 7:23am

Or maybe you could do wicking mats to grow algae and then hang them into the fish tank to let the fish teat the algae off them on a rotating basis or something?

Comment by TCLynx on November 10, 2011 at 7:22am

Hum, my water chestnut bins grew lots of algae so perhaps a shallow bin with some media in the bottom and a couple inches of water above the media exposed to sun will grow lots of algae but it could also mess with pH and dissolved oxygen levels between day and night.

Comment by Conrad Chin-Yee on November 10, 2011 at 7:16am

what's and easy effective way of growing a good supply of filamentous algae. Are other unicellular algae better for tilapia food?

Comment by TCLynx on November 10, 2011 at 7:08am

If the fish don't like the pellet feed and all water quality is really good and water temp is good and they are not under any other stress, that pellet feed may not be worth using anymore.  It may either already be bad or it just isn't food worth using.

 

Sorry to bring that possible bad news.  I've had to feed the worm bin with a fair bit of "off" feed but it is better than killing your fish with "off" feed.

Comment by Conrad Chin-Yee on November 10, 2011 at 6:53am

SW,

I just set up a 125 gallon over-wintering aquarium inside for my breeders and temporarily for my fingerlings that were the result of breeding outside in my IBC. I currently have a medium pore whole aquarium 3" foam slab that blocks off one end of the aquarium with a water pump in the small end. The pump draws water to that end thru the filter and discharges it over into the larger body of the aquarium. I just made a small 1/2 gallon size plastic drink bottle moving bed bio-filtration module. I am contemplating buying a HydroV sponge filter as my water appears to have less solids, but is somewhat cloudy. I have heaters ordered and am keeping the enclosed room warmer with a small portable heater which has really brought the water temp up to 83 degrees. Fish are not interested anymore in the pelleted store bought food or worms, but love filamentous algae. Hope they become more interested in the pelleted food again as I will soon exhaust my supply of algae, and if they don't eat up the pellets, they decay and put undue stress on the filtration system and necessitates more frequent water changes.

Comment by SW on November 10, 2011 at 6:32am

Un-Scientific Observation - I have a batch of fingerlings that I split up when they were about a month or so old.  About 2 dozen of them were being fed 3-4x a day for about 4 months with this food pellet that I get from Silvia at The Aquaponic Store. 

I recently moved some of these fish back in with some of their siblings that as-soon-as they were big enough were fed with this larger fish pellet (F2C).  Not only were they much larger, fatter and wider but they were even bigger than their siblings from a previous hatch.

I can't say enough about that.  The difference is quite noticeable.  Those pellets are also what my breeders eat.  I ran out for a few days and the breeders wouldn't even eat the other pellets.

Namaste,

Sam

 

Comment by SW on November 10, 2011 at 6:20am

Hi Dave (Lindstedt),
I'm replying here in the general discussion area to your post from "A Natural Way To have More Male Tilapia" because the reply fits better here .

I think a 20 gallon aquarium is just too small to do anything with tilapia. My smallest is a 55 gallon that I have used with a few fish hatches but I move them out ASAP because of of its size.  The larger the better for many reasons..water quality, stunted growth, stress just to name a few.

All of my breeder aquariums are in the 125 gallon range.  I have a couple of them set up on my covered back porch that siphon to a barrel and then gravity flow down to a couple of gravel beds.  A sump below the last bed pumps the filteres water back to the aquariums. All of the aquariums have about 2 inches of gravel at the bottom which helps with the bio.  In each aquarium I also have a stand alone pump operating that simple filters the water and pours it back into the aquarium.  These pumps have the standard 5" foam filter and pump in the 300 gallon per hour range.  The filters need cleaning ever few days but the water stays beautiful. In one I even have hundreds (700-800) small fingerlings in it. Personally I never even bother checking ph, ammonia, etc because I can see & smell that everything is ok.

I also have a stand alone 125 gallon aquarium that doesn't go through the previously mentioned gravel beds.  I have this aquarium set up with 4 females so there isn't nearly as much fish waste. I also have a couple inches of gravel in it but this tank also has a "super filter" on it.  The filter has 5 foam filters instead of one (bought at Home Depot for $45) and a container below that is about 1 1/2 inches in size and comes with bio balls in it.  I took the bio balls out and put in that blue aquarium filter material.  This filter only needs cleaning about once a week and I do a water exchange on it about once a month or so.  For several months I had a 2'x3' gravel grow bed over the tank and had the pump discharging into that but the plants were not getting enough sunlight so I moved it outside.  When that was in place I had hundreds of fingerlings in that tank and the water stayed a beautiful limeish green color.

For heat I have aquarium heaters set up that allow for temperature settings as-low-as 63 degrees.  I try to keep the tanks around 70.  When a cold front is approaching (such as today) I use left over strips of my blue board from my floating bed to insulate the top of the aquarium.  Try it and you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much heat gets retained.  I also stop the siphons to the gravel beds but I leave the individual pumps and aerators going.  Hopefully we do not get too long of a cold snap this winter.


Sam

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