|
hi again steve.
where is it you are, forgive me for being naive but i do not know my geography. sounds like japan or NZ but i dont think nz can have tilapia either, we are not allowed tilapia here but i sure know what you mean.
i can do the thing with the live bearers here too, i could never sell a whole pond of guppies and swords and platties, the market isnt big enough. but yes food for the best koi! brilliant. bet the koi eat my red swords and leave the browns and greens!!!!
ive seen what you mean, birds would pick up our koi and drop them in the livebearer ponds and they grew like rockets. likewize goldfish would hit full size in six months, you could tell the fish that had been reared this way even when they were old due to the size they gained.. i wasnt sure at first if it was just because they had a whole pond to graze on or it was the live guppy, then after seeing these rocket koi in amongst our select 4-5cm koi with 4 cm koi in their mouths i know it was the small fish. soon after id call it the growth from the "babies blood" all those little goodies they get.
another thing i thought is that even a predator gets its greens from within the stomach of what it is eating. say something eats 5 fish a day and everytime the prey fish has some greens in its guts and off they go!
so now its looking like i can have 9 ponds of highly nutrient algae water up top of the hill, feeding six ponds of rotifer, copepods ect and then six ponds of koi down the bottom that i will begin on a nutrient bloom also but gravity feed to when they run out, im begining to think that its likely that under this regime i will most likely be draining copepods and stuff bigger than rotifers down to the koi and goldfish as they will probably survive and grow well for the first week or so on the rotifers in theyre own pond and then want something bigger. i feel lucky to have the space to create my own food.
hmmmm begining to wonder how i would go comparitively with just 15 ponds of koi and supplemental feeding.. though the thing here is i cant just net all the ponds from birds at once so ill give this method a good flogging first.
weve got these birds round here thatll take out a thousand a day!!
they come in in flocks of 80 and spew up on the bank and then head out for more.
im pretty keen to see how this 3 way method goes in producing a pond full of fish and then checking on numbers, growth and water quality.
also my brother is dying to get his hands on a source of live feeds for all his cichlids.
we have these freshwater shrimp also that im gonna try, macrobachrium.
plus a smaller one that i dont know what it is. theyd make great live feeds for aquarium fish, i think they dont transport so well though but i plan to work it out. killed a whole bunch accidentally when i stumbled across them by draining a pond midday..
dont know about you but we can sell all our cullers to aquarium shops for feeders.
you know i was thinking of having like a little pump pumping away at night time with a light above it, pushing copees and the like into a drum screen and then draining it but now that i think about it sometype of floating mesh that is pulled through the water and harvested sounds ok too.
you know you could go super hi tech with computer controlled valves and auto sechhi type measurements but theres nothing like a good walk around a pond sometimes is there.
when i was a young bloke i used to get in the pond and drag one along and inevitably id be putting all this muck into them and my then boss would say how all the bad bacteria goes in amongst em and then the fish get a serve.
thanks for the tip on the microscope.. one day ill get this one fixed, its no good, ive had to use my eyes and a torch for everything here so far.
now to find me a whole heap of breeders... thats the next problem, 3 years to breed hey....not like the goldies..
oh one last thing! that sick fish (koi) was my old mans favourate platinum bright orange and it got stuck in the egg net and all day its been shaking its head up on the top of the water, like its got a nervous twitch or somethings stuck in its throat. it spins and shakes and twists.. almost like ammonia poisoning..but heavy gagging or gulping..there were two fish that were doing it but one came good.gills are clean and red. no signs of disease. think its an environmental one.
im thinking maybe a lack of oxygen has given it brain damage and its doomed.
any ideas??? i moved it away to a different tank but it still went on for over two hours.. ill probably find him dead in the morning..the tell tale stale eye..pretty hard to give the old man back a stale eye koi, harder to try find one the same here in australia! yeh better go and look at him again.
no do meter, no microscope, no ammonia test kit..some day steve, some day..
|