Squeee we has tilapia!

Fish. Live Fish.
When I got the e-mail from tilapiafingerlings.com saying they would ship late last night, I went to the web to re-watch Murray Hallams discussion about getting new fish and how to deal with them.


I carefully reviewed the instructions in the e-mail:
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Receiving and Acclimating Your Fingerlings

In order to properly acclimate your fish to their new environment you will need to follow the steps below. You should already have a tank established and ready with de-chlorinated water, proper ph, and an air stone with sufficient air bubbling through it. You will need to begin the process below immediately after receiving your fish.

1. (Thermal Acclimation) Remove inflated bag from styrofoam box and place sealed bag in receiving tank. Sealed bag should float on top of the tank for 15 minutes in order for the temperature of the water in the bag to slowly equalize with the water in the tank.
   
2. (PH Acclimation) Remove the clip on the bag and roll down the sides to make a float around the sides of the bag. Then place a bubbling air-stone inside of the bag since the sealed up oxygen will have escaped when you opened the bag. Over the course of 15 minutes, you will slowly add an additional 1.5 gallons of water from the receiving tank and pour it into the bag, in order to gradually acclimate the fish to the ph of the receiving tank.

After step 2 you will tip the bag over to let the fish escape. They will generally go straight to the bottom for a few hours until they get used to their new environment. It may take a couple of hours until they are ready to eat food

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We had one little guy who was clearly "not like the others." As in, they were swimming and he was not. Seems he got caught in a crease during shipping and suffocated. The new tilapia are significantly smaller than my goldfish, so I got a pop-up hamper to protect the tilapia. It isnt that the goldfish would eat the tilapia, but my comet goldfish liked to badger their fellow goldfish. I can only imagine the fun theyd have chasing baby tilapia - until, that is, the tilapia "stopped swimming..."

Ill post more in a few days. Hopefully the tilapia will continue to do well!

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Using Tilapia for Indoor Aquaponics

tilapia niloticus (tilapiasource.com) vs. image from egyptian tomb
The heart of an aquaponics system is the fish. Tilapia grow fast (fingerling to plate sized in 6-9 months), like tank culture, will eat anything, and like the kind of temperatures I like. Plus they have a white, flaky flesh I know my family likes to eat.

The folks at Tilapia Vita Farms, aka Tilapia Farming At Home, have put together a guide to legal issues relative to keeping tilapia in each state. Living in Virginia, I must obtain a permit to "import, possess, propagate, buy, and sell" tilapia, and must provide

place of origin, the name and address of the exporter and a certificate from a licensed and accredited practicing veterinarian, or certified fish pathologist, certifying that the animal to be imported is not manifesting any signs of infectious, contagious, or communicable disease.

I can use mossambique tilapia, nile tilapia, blue tilapia, and/or zanzibar tilapia. The Virginia permits ($22.50 total) expire December 31st, no matter when you obtain the permits. So I plan to wait until January to get my tilapia. With the holidays coming up, deferring fish to January isnt much of a delay.

After fondly considering the various breeds and sources, Im leaning towards nile tilapia. It sounds good to say this is because the nile tilapia is directly related to the fish of pharaohs. Alas, Im just a sucker for the pretty white variant developed by White Brook Tilapia Farm. For better or worse, nile tilapia are the slowest to reach sexual maturity (16-18 weeks compared to 11 weeks for blue tilapia).

Even better, for my penny-pinching, internet-loving soul, I can get live White Brook tilapia via eBay ($25 + $89 S&H for 25 fry (1/2"), $50 + $89 S&H for 25 fingerlings (1")). Thats $114 or $139 to you and me. Additional batches of 25 can be purchased with only a $5 increase to S&H.

Pros of other variants:

Blue tilapia can survive colder temperatures, down to 45 degrees fahrenheit. You can find these on eBay - I am impressed with White Brook Farms descriptions and pricing (same as the white niles mentioned above), but right now you can get as few as five from another source for under $35 (fish + S&H).

Female Mozambique tilapia and male Zanzibar tilapia can be interbred to produce predominantly male offspring. Since a mature female tilapia can produce 200-1000 fry every two months, this can be an important consideration. Edgar Sanchez at Tilapia Vita Farms currently offers breeder colonies for $399 + $99 S&H.

Heres hoping White Brook Farms has nile tilapia available in January 2011!

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Tilapia Legal in Your Town

98% of America can legally raise Tilapia

I can legally raise tilapia at home. It just takes a couple of inexpensive permits.

Many members of my family live in Utah, where it is completely illegal to raise tilapia. That puts a big damper on enthusing about my latest project in family circles.

So I got curious - where in the US and her territories may tilapia be raised in a closed loop system?

So far, the only states that appear to prohibit tilapia entirely are Utah (0.9% of the US population), Nevada (0.8% of the US population), and Maine (0.4% of the US population). Utah and Nevada make a big point of prohibiting tilapia. Maine merely fails to list tilapia as one of the myriad species allowed (and all not on the list are prohibited).

Tilapia appear to be allowed in all other states and territories, or the other ~98% of the US population. If I found something in a somewhat believable website that explicitly stated no permit was required for an indoor, closed loop system, I colored that state green. However laws change and the websites I found might be wrong. You should contact your local Department of Natural Resources (or whatever its called in your state) to make sure what kind of permit(s), if any, are required for you to set up a home-based, indoor, closed loop aquaponic system. You may also find that your "favorite" kind of tilapia are prohibited, but some other variant is not on the prohibited list.

Relatively few places in the US permit uncontrolled outdoor use of tilapia, especially where there is risk the fish could get into public waterways - another reason US folks are unlikely to be able to set up tilapia-based aquaponic systems in their backyards.

If you find out my map is wrong, let me know and Ill update it.

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Tilapia Breeding

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Tilapia Diseases 101

Tilapia tolerate adverse water quality and other stressors better than most other commercial aquaculture species. Because stress and environmental quality play such important roles in the disease process, tilapia are labeled as being very "disease-resistant." This basically means that in the presence of pathogens, tilapia are the last to break with disease.
As a result, tilapia growers worldwide did not historically practice clean culture methods. Moreover, they did not generally implement the biosecurity measures that had become standard in industries that grew less disease-resistant fish such as trout and salmon. In other words, there was no apparent penalty for being careless - or so it seemed.


Read more:  http://www.americulture.com/Disease.htm

When fish are sick I generally add enough salt to bring the concentration up to 3.0 ppt.
While the fish stores may try to sell you various cures, my experience is if it takes anything more than salt your fish were probably doomed to die anyway. 

Some people go higher then 3.0 ppt, but thats what I use.  I have a meter so its pretty easy to be accurate but you can go by weight.  For example if you have a 100 gallon system you will add about 2.5 lb of salt.  I did a little math.  5.5 cups = 2.5 lb.

So get some plain Solar water softener salt and dump in 5.5 cups for each 100 gallons of water in your system.  Toss it in the sump tank so as not to hurt the fish.  You can change out some water to bring the level down to about 1ppt after the fish stop dieing.  You should not leave the salt that high forever because its not good for some plants and the pathogens you wish to get rid of can adapt to the high salinity, but a little is good.  I like to use Sea-90 to keep trace minerals in the system.. You could use Sea-90 instead of Solar water softener salt, but its more expensive.

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