Aquaponics - Silver perch eating lettuce

I finally managed to get some video of my fish eating lettuce.

I left the camera running for hours and eventually got a few hits. They seem to eat a lot of it overnight, but hardly touch it during the day. Perhaps it draws too much attention to themselves.

Here is all the feeding I managed to capture from all those hours of footage. The first scene doesn't really catch them feeding, but I like it so I left it in. There was a lot of footage where they spent time hanging around under the lettuce as they did in the first scene. Perhaps the water tastes nice under the lettuce.

Aquaponics - Fish salad

A fish salad doesn't need to involve eating a fish. Sometimes its enough to just invite a fish to a salad dinner.

Some of my cos lettuce is going to seed, and that means it starts to get a bit bitter.

We repeat harvest our cos lettuce by pulling off leaves as we need them. This means you need a lot less room to get a salad every day, because the root stock is big and healthy, and the leaves you pull off are soon replaced. Repeat harvesting means none of the waiting for all that growing plants need to do when you plant them from seed.

But one nice thing about keeping silver perch, is that they eat all kinds of stuff.

I cut the top off a lettuce and dropped it into the fish tank.

Usually, you don't see any great excitement from the fish, but by the next morning it looks like it's been attacked by a bunch of lazy vegetarian piranha.

Aquaponics - Worms

Worms.

I bought some worms and fed them to my fish.

They went nuts for them.

My worms came in a tub that said there were 70 of them inside. It also said they were from a company called Orana Inc.  The package didnt mention what kind of worms they were so I looked up their website.

Worms have web sites these days.

It turns out these people help other people who need help, and help them help me get worms. That's a lot of help, so all things being equal, and you live in Adelaide, (which you don't) buy worms from these people.

It also turns out my worms are known as red wrigglers. I bought them from a fishing tackle store as bait worms, but it looks like they may be the same worms you might add to a composting worm farm.

Someone named chillidude suggested that silver perch might not lose interest in food over winter, but instead, might just have different food requirements. I thought I'd give it a go, so bought some worms.

I did a bit of study on worms and found they can happily live in an aquaponics system. It seems, as long as there is plenty of oxygen, they can deal with being under water for ages.

A lot of people add worms to their systems, but quite a lot find that worms have moved in of their own accord, so it must be a nice place for them to live.

I added some worms to my system.

They help break down solids like roots, that are left behind when you harvest or remove a plant. They also help break down fish solids and make sure all the solids are spread throughout the grow bed rather than all gugging around the point or points where the water enters.

I added my worms in the corner opposite my core sampler, in the hope that I will find some in a core sample one day, and gain some idea of how long it took for them to get there.

It took less than 24 hours.

This isn't a picture of it taking less than 24 hours. Its a picture of the other corner.

The corner where I added the worms.

I like my core sampler.

This isn't a picture of the core sampler, but is in fact the opposite corner where I added the worms.

Its taken a few minutes after I added the worms.

I like my new worm friends.

These are some of my new worm friends.











I don't see them often, but I know they care.

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Aquaponics - Silver Perch feeding dynamics

I've got to get hold of a better camera.

I was taking some photo's of my fish, and thinking of doing a post on their growth rate over the last 6 months, when I noticed the way they absorb a feed pellet.

It is quite interesting.

For some time now, as the fish have become bigger, I've been hearing a violent "thuck" sound as the fish take feed pellets off the surface of the water.

I was never sure if it was their tails simply making a splash, or something else.

But this seems to indicate they might be sucking in a stack of water with the pellet.

What ever is going on, it's making me think it might be worth revisiting with a better camera.

This series of shots spanned just 1/5 of a second.