The great outdoors

[Luis A M]

Sometimes delicate larvae could be raised in large outdoor ponds or "mesocosm",while it was not possible to do the same in indoor tanks.Reasons for this are hard to understand,and the whole system is affected by wild forces and difficult to handle factors.

While I can´t afford the luxury of a SW lagoon in my appt,I set a 150x120x30 deep cm (5x4x1´)vat on a deck,protected from the North by a building,so that it only gets few hours of direct sun,with the purpose of raising bs,as I feared not having enough to feed my 200 plus growing H.reidi.
The tank was filled with tanks siphoned water,heavy in left overs/detritus.It was a dirty mess and bs never took off.Even Caulerpa died soon in there.Bubbling air in the center of the tank,improved things a bit,no more froth or odors.But then the water became dark green pea soup.I tossed some rotifers in,and few days later the whole vat was crystal clear and full of rots.
Then the rots crashed and vanished but the water remained clear.

A week ago I had to let pass a nice Tomato nest for lack of space/rots.So,I put the nest in the vat,just to give the small buggers a chance
Well,they hatched and look exceptionally active and healthy,patrolling at high speeds the surface of their "ocean"!
There were little food organisms there,only one rot in several 2 ml samples.
But the larvae were always full bellied and are starting metam.today.From now on,it will be a matter of giving some bs/Oto.

I envision something similar with better water and plankton,for difficult larvae.Not very scientific,but worth to play with!

[mwp]

Sounds interesting...wish I had the space, even if only for the summer months!

Matt

[Kmiec123]

Cool Idea

[Kathy55g]

fabulous story... I have dreamed of doing such a thing, except we have neighborhood cats that would destroy everything. Alternatively, I have thought of setting up a pool in the garage. In the summer, that is. I do know that it is summer for Luis right now.

I am lucky to have escaped with my power lines intact after a recent ice storm here in the heartland. If I had lost heat, I would have lost all my fish. Next purchase: generator.

[Luis A M]

Kathy,a pool in the garage,is just a big tank,not an outdoor tank!
You need to cover it with an anti vermin net.I will have to do this if I want to keep the clowns in there,because of benteveos (Pitangus sulphuratus) a bold fishing bird.
Now,an outdoor pool is not a little piece of the ocean,it is very unstable.It is more like a tidepool (though tides never come )
Besides the expected fluctuations of temperature and salinity (after a heavy rain),pH highrockets to incredible figures during the day and dives back at night.
Amazingly (and luckily)these extreme pH shifts don´t have any effect on tank´s organisms.

[Peter Schmiedel]

Luis,

maybe these changes, the UV light, the natural sunlight plus the fact that the tank is left tomitself established a huge fauna or mirco organism which will let your frey boost like this. I believe they can take much more varity in water quality then we expect. I wish we would have outside temps which allow these kind of experiments - but I will keep it in mind for the summer

[aomont]

Hey Luis, what little food you have in there that they migth have eaten ? Besides rots (pretty low concentration as you said) is there copepods, ciliates, ???pods. What are they eating to get so well ?
Anderson.

[FuEl]

Interesting Luis. Reminds me of the outdoor culture ponds that some countries use for rearing prawn larvae. Less labour involved and entirely left to the hands of nature.

[Luis A M]

Originally posted by aomont
Hey Luis, what little food you have in there that they migth have eaten ? Besides rots (pretty low concentration as you said) is there copepods, ciliates, ???pods. What are they eating to get so well ?
Anderson.

L rots were about 0.1/ml,much lower than the typical 1-10/ml concentrations,but more similar to actual zooplankton density in the wild.I found a red wormish thing about the size of rots in same concentration.No planktonic pods though I found some molts of benthic harpacticoids.And one day I had a medusae bloom,evidence that tank walls must be covered by hydroids.This is bad news for larvae,and probably the cause of bs failure to propagate in there.
I placed a newly hatched lot of L.amboinensis in the tank. and none was there the following morning...
Shrimp but also fish are raised in ponds.P.maculatus and asfur were done in ponds.They fertilize,promote a phyto bloom,introduce zooplankton,and when they propagate fish larvae come.About the same thing I did.Only that huge ponds are stable and my tank is not.In this case,size matters!

Another interesting aspect of outside tanks/pools is that they seemingly can recycle badly polutioned water into pristine water,safe to re-use.Frank H.used this aproach in his landlocked hatchery in Florida.

[EMBRYOGUY]

i admire you for taking this hobby further along. i use to be into high quality japanese kois. and the premise is very similar to what you are proposing with having an outdoor larvae system.

the jap. raise baby kois in dirty mud ponds. to them, this yields the best color and quality of kois. many attempts have been made to duplicate this indoors but with substandard success.

maybe a parrallel theory is working here. i have alot of respect for hobbyist willing to step away from the normal routine, with a good insight.



thank you.

[Luis A M]

C´mon,don´t make me blush! Just playing around with a dirty pool!
I always imagined there was some poorly understood,"magic"power in sunlight.Many FW hobbyists like to "summer" their fish outside,with amazing growth and colour improvements.I once set a reef tank in a greenhouse "a la Calfo"and it was great until Summer temps became too high.But it had pH peaks that I was trying to handle with the addition of CO2.
Basically as I said to Kathy,the difference between a garage pool and same pool outside is sunlight,and it´s correlated shifts in temp.salinity and pH.
So far my temps range 25-30ºC(78-86ºF) and pH 8.14-8.75.
Not that bad,see:
http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...hreadid=745333
It seems that pH climbs as a function of algal photosynthesis,which produces O2 and takes CO2.This tank is not packed in macroalgae like that one,just a short turf on the walls.

[Luis A M]

Things are not easy in the pool The sun is very high now and the North side building does not give much shade.And it is very warm!
I keep feeding bbs and Otohime.
But now some brown algae bloomed.Could be T-ISO or PAV (no way to tell them apart)or even some wild weed.Water is turning brown,Secchi ruler was 25cm Friday and 18 cm yesterday.Temperatures climbed to 31.8ºC and pH rose to 9:96!
This shows again how algal activity depletes CO2 from the water launching the pH to the sky .I dumped a bucket of rots expecting them to clear the water back.As stated before bs don´t grow in the tank.
Guess you´re wondering what happened with the baby tomatos?.Well,they´re just fine,enjoying their tidepool! .Shows how relative (though well intentioned)is sometimes our concern in keeping rigid water parameters
Last Night a huge rainstorm fell down and today is rainy and cooler.The tank overflowed and was flushed with rain water. Salinity went from 1.023 to 1.014.Temp came to 22.7ºC and turbidity to 22 cm.pH keeps at 9.48.
The fish are OK,thank you!
So is life in the great outdoors

[Peter Schmiedel]

Luis,

your playing Darwins Theories: Surivial of the fittest (tomatos)

[papagimp]

fwiw, i've been reading through a Bangaii breeding manual, where they utilize a large "saltwater pond" for feeding the babies. They claim massive fluctuations in PH and Salinity (due to rainfall) but overall, the Bangaii's don't seem to react like you'd think. The pond, with all it's algae and nastiness, provides massive amounts of zooplankton. Feeding brine shrimp nauplii only occastionally as a supplemnet to the zooplankton they already recieve from the pond. I wanted to put something like this together but have no room for an outdoor pond. An indoor "tideless tide pool" may just be the answer. Great work and keep that brain working on new and better methods!

[Timothy McCandless]

Where ddid you get the breeding manual?


Thank you for this post it has inspired me to convince my wife that we need a pond.

Tim McCandless

[Dman]

would a huge vat in a building that has a removeable or retractable roof work?

[spawner]

Originally posted by papagimp
fwiw, i've been reading through a Bangaii breeding manual, where they utilize a large "saltwater pond" for feeding the babies. They claim massive fluctuations in PH and Salinity (due to rainfall) but overall, the Bangaii's don't seem to react like you'd think. The pond, with all it's algae and nastiness, provides massive amounts of zooplankton. Feeding brine shrimp nauplii only occastionally as a supplemnet to the zooplankton they already recieve from the pond. I wanted to put something like this together but have no room for an outdoor pond. An indoor "tideless tide pool" may just be the answer. Great work and keep that brain working on new and better methods!

Are you talking about Steven Hopkins work on the cardinals? Great work really, very low tech very effective and profitable, sure will increase when the Apend. II listing goes through.

[aomont]

Where ddid you get the breeding manual?

Take a look here Timothy.

Anderson.

[danfrith]

Very interesting and great post. And it makes sense. Think about the huge changes in salinity palegic fry on the surface of the water must go through every time it rains, not to mention the sun so close to them on the surface producing all that algae. So, how did those tomatoe clowns due luis?

[Slakker]

Maybe this will make better, stronger fish than breeding within a closed, easily controlled system...or maybe it's more similar to what they deal with when in the wild...

Are you moving them to a growout tank anytime soon, or no?

Either way, keep us posted!!!

[Dman]

Anderson,
Thanks for the link. Very cool paper.

[Matthew37]

Very cool, I really enjoy the post

It reminds me of an article that talked about the spawning of black cap basslets.
The author said that the abult pairs where kept outside with only a shade cloth over the tanks, The hatchery was in puerto rico and the fish could stay outside all year, the writer said that the tempature and the PH values vaired greatly, but all the pairs spawned.

So it would be cool to try spawning and raising a "hard" fish in an outdoor tank.

Keep the updates coming

[aomont]

ok, I have that one too !

Anderson.

[Kmiec123]

Wonder if in the Midwest a tank in a green house would give the same effects...Natural sunlight and at least you can control the rain and temp swing variable...Just a thought...Carl

[Matthew37]

A greenhouse would be good idea becuase it would keep the rain from changing the salinity of the water. And it would greatly extend the summer, if your living in a cold climate.

My dad had a 30'x100' green that he used on his farm, and it gave you about 5 months of good weather, athough there were big tempature swings at night. but i was woundering if that might encourage the fish to spawn? I common trick used by freshwater fish breeders is to cuase a big tempature change and this cuases the fish to spawn. I also wounder if the nature light helps the fry hunt for the rots? And in one book it talked about Infusoria (microscopic aquatic protozoans) for marine fish and said that they should be cultured outside.