Tilapia

Tilapia don't ask for much. In fact, they only have five

basic needs: clean water, oxygen, food, light and room to

swim.

Give your tilapia these things, and they will stay healthy

and grow fast. The art of tilapia farming is to understand

each of these needs, and then find a way to provide them

in sufficient quantities. The problem is, that each of these

five needs comes with a myriad of potentially complicated

questions, and solutions.

FACTORS TO CONSIDER

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• Make sure that you are willing to drink from your water source before you give it to your tilapia.

• Put new water into a transfer container, for further treatment, before adding it to your pond.

• Make sure that the temperature is the same as to what your tilapia are already accustomed.

• Use DeChlor to remove chlorine and reduce heavy metals in new water, before it is introduced into your tilapia pond.

• Do not rely on time to remove chlorine from your water.

• Adjust the pH of the water in your transfer container and your pond to ideal before you introduce the new water to your tilapia.

• Water temperature influences oxygen content

• The light influences oxygen content

• Decomposition depletes oxygen

• Maximize surface aeration before considering alternatives

• 18 hours of light per day, using a combination of sunlight and electric light, that stays on until midnight. Why? Because the longer that tilapia have light, the longer they will stay active; the more they will eat, and the faster they will grow.

• 1 fish for every 2.5 gallon

Pre-Filters: Also referred to in this guide as a coarse filter, is nothing more than a barrier that traps undissolved solids as water passes through. If you are using a swirl trap, then the pre-filter will serve as a secondary trap for solids that have a neutral buoyancy, or otherwise escape. If you aren't using a swirl trap, then your pre-filter must be designed to handle a large amount of solid material. Drum filters are the most common types of pre-filters found on medium and large tilapia farms. Some drum filters are the size of city buses, while others are not much bigger than a recliner; it all depends on the amount of solid material being produced by the tilapia. Don’t be afraid to use your own ingenuity when it comes to pre-filters. There is nothing magical about commercially produced filtration systems. If you have the skills to make your own, by all means, go for it. A good analog for a pre-filter is nothing more than a bucket, with holes drilled in the bottom, filled with polyester pillow stuffing, suspended over the pond, and a pump to drop water through it. Of course, this isn’t very practical, because it would be time-consuming to service, and there are other filtration steps that need to happen, but the analogy is still accurate.

Aquaponics Point: You are running an aquaponics system to grow vegetables, not a fish sewage treatment plant. Do not allow any solid wastes to enter your grow beds. Always use a settling tank or swirl filter to remove as many undissolved solid particles as you can, before they make it to your plants.

Note: I have taken a little bit of criticism for the aquaponics point above. Purists will tell you to go ahead and allow the fish poop to enter the grow beds and use worms to compost the poop. My response is that I stand by my advice, especially for large commercial growers. To find out why

start with an Internet search for "the effects of food grown in the presence of animal feces".

Fine-particle filters: Use a bead filter, sand filter, diatomaceous earth filter, or in-line water filter right after your pump, to trap dissolved solids. They are very effective at removing the particles that are too small to be trapped by any other filtration step. On a small scale, fine-particle filtration might not be necessary, due to the relatively low volume of water. This is especially true if you set up a pre-filter consisting of a swirl trap, followed by some compressed polyester pads. The biggest worry with this configuration will be an increased level of tannins and possibly phenols. In commercial tilapia farming, fine-particle filters are fitted between the water pump and the final water sterilization and polishing.

Biological filter: Not really a filter at all, its only purpose is to provide a large surface area on which nitrifying bacteria can grow. A box, with water in the bottom, and some bio media, provides plenty of surface area for bacteria colonies to develop. If you want, you can put some bio media above the water to allow aerobic nitrifying bacteria to take hold. There are a few design tricks to keeping a constant water level inside a plastic box, but it’s nothing that you can’t figure out if you decided to make your own. Biological filters should not need much servicing. In fact, you should avoid messing with them at all unless you notice that they are restricting the flow of water. This is why we prefer the wet/dry system, as opposed to the sand filters - the clear plastic makes it easy for us to see what is happening inside the biofilter.

Aquaponics Point: Flood and drain grow beds are the biological filter in aquaponics systems. In systems consisting of only floating rafts, a traditional biological filter will still be needed. There, we said it twice.

Important Point: As previously stated, There are certain tilapia farming situations where biological filters are not used. Do not use these alternative ammonia removal methods with aquaponics systems. Doing so will starve the Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter thereby eliminating the supply of nitrates for the plants.