A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

More Than 1 Type Of Fish?

I'm thinking of mixing my fish. Catfish, Large Mouth Bass, Bluegill, and Minnows. Anyone see a problem?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by TCLynx on January 17, 2011 at 11:20am

Tilapia of the small protein hunger stage will eat any smaller siblings and smaller goldfish if they can. Keep em well fed with high protein feed and they will likely play nice, let em get too hungry and that could be a different story. Just make sure you have good filtration to handle the high protein feeding.

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Permalink Reply by nathaniel taylor on February 9, 2011 at 4:57pm

get to know thier personalities by observing them in a tank you will soon know enough about them to understand if they will like each other. Its trial and error.

In general community tanks are hard as the fish often have undocumented personalities and they change over time, form a fry to and adult, they may become territorial and aggressive.

A school of bluegill catfish and bass can pretty much eat through a group of unprotected minnows you might want varying environments.

I say go for it but in all honesty you just described a typ. pond. In good natural pond/lake there are environments for every stage of life and species.

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Permalink Reply by Margo Searls-Begy on February 10, 2011 at 7:28am

I have goldfish, Koi, and White nile tilapia of all sizes mixed in and so far so good. Although, I'm not sure I could tell if there were predation going on...

I put some large PVC pipe joints for them to smim into and around, so they could find hidy holes from one another. They seem to like their aquadic "jungle gyms", and maybe it lessens the stress somewhat of having to share a tank.

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Permalink Reply by clint miller on March 6, 2011 at 11:00pm

I have some large mouth bass. I'll trade for a couple of those crawdads. I have 6 had to separate them from the bluegills and the catfish. They keep trying to eat the catfish ( catfish about 2in). If your fish are a little bigger they'll be ok. They didnt like eating the pellats at first but got use to it. The bass are cool but do like to test out mouth to fish size on all their tank mates.