| The only mud pond I have access to is a golf course pond and I have to keep the fish enclosed in aquaculture cages to prevent the predator/heron losses from approaching 100%. So I can't use the mud pond for fry.
For the first 10 days I feed thick super charged green water supplimented with cyclopeeze and brine shrimp. I grow the green water in a 500 gallon temporary doughboy that gets lots of sunlight plus fed teaspoons of 10% ammonia solution. It works great and gets green and slimy in just under 10 days from the initial setup on about April 20th. My wife threatens a trial seperation every time I set this contraption up.
Then I wean them off to ground HBH crumbles so I can get the size down to a finer powder. Screening the HBH crumbles in a fine strainer lets me start with the fines at about 3 weeks.
It is amazing to get such a large percentage of the fry up to 1" size and greater in just barely 4 weeks. Then they start to pack on growth as they become reliable grazers.
I switch over to small pellets at the 2 1/2 to 3 month mark just to get them reliably eating what everyone else will feed them as they go to new homes.
I do not have a lot of fry space so culling stages are very aggressive and I usually have the keepers culled down to 500 or less by the end of the 3rd month. |