Breeder Rack

Hey guys, so for a long time I've wanted to breed fish, and now I've finally gotten the chance! I got a chiller for my birthday (I'll be out of town so I got stuff early, and I picked it out because I spotted one for a steal), so I'm planning on setting up this system pictured below. It's going to be intended for breeding Darters, Dace, and maybe a few shiners!

 Breeder Rack.png   166.49KB   14 downloads

I'm open for questions and constructive criticism! Thanks for your help, guys!

A few thoughts. These are all just personal opinion and you can take them with a grain of salt or with as much interest as you want:

• Multiple fry rearing tanks would prevent big fry from eating small fry.
• A chiller can chill multiple aquariums if you combine the instructions found in these two videos:
  youtube.com/watch?v=65yVr7DiDls and youtube.com/watch?v=CUFoVP59LmE
• If you connect the tanks with the above design, a single fluidized bed filter could effectively bacterially filter all of the linked tanks, http://www.bioconlabs.com/abtqs.html and http://www.thatpetpl...CFQo6nAodvwwA4w
• Grindal worms are very similar to blackworms except they don't require aquarium space to culture. Microworms are also easy to culture, and fry will eat them. See post #55: http://forum.nanfa.o...ks/page__st__40
• Table 2 of this webpage shows how aquatic plants are more effective than terrestrial plants at cleaning aquariums because unlike terrestrial plants, which prefer nitrate, aquatic plants prefer to eat ammonium. Whenever ammonium is present they will stop eating nitrate and rapidly switch to ammonium, removing all of it basically independent of concentration within four hours, Table 2: http://www.theaquari...ical_Filtration This makes plants an excellent fail safe for fry tanks, where ammonia in any concentration will stunt growth. A purely bacterially filtered system will have a persistent ammonia concentration for days or weeks because the nitrogen converting bacteria don't have a rapid doubling time and can't quickly compensate for ammonia spikes. A system with live aquatic plants removes all ammonia within four hours.
  Ceratophyllum demersum is an example of an ammonia-preferring native aquatic plant that needs no substrate and can be grown either floating or weighted down, as long as all of it gets water flow. Just make sure it doesn't clean the water too effectively (if nitrate drops below 10 ppm it tends to run out of food and die. This is a problem most fishkeepers wish they had: having to feed extra to keep nitrate above 10 ppm. That's perfect fry water.).
• As I reminded myself yet again this morning as I scooped three dozen fish from a bucket on my floor, yes, you do need a place to put fish that are in holding ready to be sold. Scooping them out of a bare walled container the morning you ship them is much easier than hunting them down in your main tank, but you probably shouldn't do what I'm doing right now and have that be a bucket on the floor. XD

Edited by EricaWieser, 01 April 2013 - 05:22 PM.

Thank you for the suggestions! I have some responses that I'll list in line with those!
- I plan to put the bigger fry in a series of separate 10 gallons with HMFs on a rack in my closet in the fish room.
- Yes, that's pretty much what I plan to be doing in this rack.
- I actually will be using a fluidized bed on one of my bigger tanks, using Kaldnes rather than sand, but I'm really happy with the filtration already on this aquarium.
- I understand that, but I've never been able to get grindle worms going, they always fungus up by the end of the second day, and I don't get enough time to harvest them and put them in a sponge media setup. And I figured, why not use that extra space under the aquaponics system for growing blackworms? I really like their ability to clean up substrates.
- I also understand that submerged plants are superior filters, but I'm actually looking at the terrestrial plants simply because I want the vegetables/fruits depending on what I decide to grow. Probably miniature cucumbers and possibly peas so I can use them to feed my fish, and then whatever the rest of my family would like!
- Yeah, I will surely have a tank on my 10 gallon rack for fish ready to be shipped out. Thanks for reminding me of that.

Thanks again! Keep them coming!

Edited by Yeahson421, 01 April 2013 - 07:40 PM.