RE: NANFA-L-- paddlefish (was: moon's sturgeons)

Hoover, Jan J ERDC-EL-MS (Jan.J.Hoover at erdc.usace.army.mil)
Wed, 21 Sep 2005 18:10:37 -0500

>>>I once got my hands on about twenty small (two inch) paddlefish and kept
them in a round kids pool. They were trained on pellet feed and did well.
They would only feed while the feed was suspended in the water column (the
pool was only a couple of inches deep, so they had to be quick). Anyway it
was easy to overfeed and wasted feed had to be cleaned up immediately.<<<

Round pools are good because they reduce rostrum injuries, but paddlefish do
better in shallow racetrack- or doughnut-shaped tanks with directional flow.
You could probably modify a kiddie-pool by placing a stack of round stepping
stones in the middle, and using a power head in the outside channel to push
the water around the stack.

We have raised small paddlefish to moderate size (approx 12-15 inches) in
less than a year with minimal effort in a shallow (11 in deep) ring-shaped
tank. Uneaten food was picked up off the bottom (by very small and by larger
fish) and there was almost no waste. We fed frozen brine shrimp and
bloodworms, however, and not pellets. Hatchery managers rearing padddlefish
in large concrete troughs also report a disinclination of the fish to feed on
pellets from the bottom and a lot of wasted food. They compensate for this
with frequent (or continuous) feeding and intensive filtration/flow-through
systems.

- Jan Hoover
Vicksburg, MS
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