Fry Bucket Idea

HI all, I'm kinda kicking around this idea for raising fry & wonder if anyone has tried something like this.

Basically, prepare several cultures of greenwater & paramecium.

Then set up some five gallon food - safe buckets (or other small tanks/ rearing containers with very gentle aeration. "Seed" the buckets & put them under lights until the water is pea soup green.

Then put in some new fry (or spawning mops with eggs, etc ...) & a cycled sponge filter.

Keep your separate greenwater & paramecium cultures going. If the water begins to clear, add some additional cultures to the bucket.

Supplemental foods can be added if you want.

When it's time to catch the young fish carefully strain the bucket contents through a net.

The idea is to emerse the growing fry in an environment chock full of appropriate sized foods.

I'm curious if they'd grow faster or better, if it would backfire & they'd die, and how they would handle being moved to a traditional clear - water aquarium.

What do you guys think?

 

As long as water conditions could be kept safe as well as o2 levels I don't see why it wouldn't work. You may get interesting results.

 

I try to do that for my fry, though I use clear totes rather than buckets. It's nice because you can see them at least a little, and it helps keep the algae going since there's light coming in from all around. I don't add paramecium though... I didn't know you could get cultures! I'll have to look into it : )

 

You can make your own paramecium cultures. There are a lot of ways to do it. Most use squeezing from a gunky filter & some other stuff. But they're prone to crashing - so always keep multiple going. Google can point you to some directions.

 

Clear totes is a brilliant idea! I'll do that.