Aquaponics - Algae eating suckfish death

The smaller of my two little algae eating fish died today.

It always looked a little off, and spent a few hours swimming upside down in the days after I first put them in there, but has since looked happy enough. I'm wondering if it got too cold for it. I was told they were happy in unheated water, but perhaps if it was already a bit sick...

The temperatures in my system, have been down around 10c the last few days.

I have a really bad cold, and have totally failed to seal up all the gaps in my grow house due to spending every spare minute of my life in bed. Those gaps include one big enough for me to get through.

I'm also not sure that this grow house really works. Even when it was first installed and was in the standard layout, it never seemed warm. I think I might need to investigate going back to a clear plastic version.

The other potential problem is that the relative size of the fish tank to the grow house means it acts as a massive heat sink, and takes 5 degrees of air temperature gain and turns it into 1 degree of water temperature gain. From memory, water has 5 times the thermal capacity of air, so that might be a large part of the problem.

In other words, a big grow house can heat a little fish tank, but a small grow house can't heat a large fish tank.





120 Things in 20 years discovers that sometimes an aquaponics algae eating suckfish can get dead due to a large thermal mass in your grow house (or something else). Who knew.