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

madtom (madtom at itlnet.net)
Wed, 21 Sep 2005 19:25:21 -0500

Yeah, the fish I got were hatchery reared in large round tanks.
I had a powerhead which caused circular rotation and the set up was
perfect. The only glitch was the "trash" that got in the tank. It was
kinda like long strings of bacterial floc or maybe spider web. Anyway,
Their mouths are huge and always open and every single one of them became
entangled in it and died.
I only had about twenty, but the remainder ( I forget how many, but I
think a few thousand) of the hatchery stock grew well and were stocked at
about 12 inches TL. I think they reached about 12" in one growing season.
Anyway, It sure looked funny hauling them to the lake in a square tank.
They just go to a corner, stick their nose out of the water and keep
swimming.

madtom

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hoover, Jan J ERDC-EL-MS" <Jan.J.Hoover at erdc.usace.army.mil>
To: <nanfa-l at nanfa.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 6:10 PM
Subject: RE: NANFA-L-- paddlefish (was: moon's sturgeons)

> >>>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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/ visit http://www.nanfa.org Please make sure all posts to nanfa-l are
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