Grading Fry

For those of you that grade fry, what do you use? Is there a product out there or am I going to have to go screen/net shopping The grading boxes and screens I have seen on-line all seemed aimed at larger fish than I need them for.

For those of you that grade fry, what do you use? Is there a product out there or am I going to have to go screen/net shopping The grading boxes and screens I have seen on-line all seemed aimed at larger fish than I need them for.

This is a problem I will be addressing soon as well. We will be looking around or local Hobby Lobby for plastic screens / grills to serve as the semi-permiable partition in the scaled down fish grader.

This is a problem I will be addressing soon as well. We will be looking around or local Hobby Lobby for plastic screens / grills to serve as the semi-permiable partition in the scaled down fish grader.

I lost ~50% of a batch of rainbow fry when 7 or 8 of them exploded in size almost overnight and ate 20 or so of the smaller ones. Want to be able to seperate them and get this figured out before I locate and buy some native shiners to play with. Let me know what you may come up with and I will do the same. One material I was considering is the plastic grid stuff used for cross-stitching, but the holes may not be big enough for the "second screening"

Having similar issues. Also problems with mesh used to sort acting like a gill net on fry almost but not quite small enough.
Almost seems like it would just be better for the big ones to eat the little ones.

I haven't done this before, but one thing I've picked up from fish hatcheries and other info I've seen is that a slatted sorter is potentially better than actual mesh.

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Ideally you want the "slats" to be rounded, not with sharp edges. This sort of setup will have the result of grading the fry/fish by girth, not length, and will result in less getting stuck in a way that could injure them. I'd also think it's much more possible to build your own slatted sorter to your exact needed size than to find/build the mesh at reasonable cost. It could be as simple as a rigid frame with thick stainless wire as the "slats".

The much larger version of this I've seen in a hatchery to separate juvenile fish actually uses 1/2" PVC tubes as the slats -- you'd just be doing a version scaled way, way down.

If I have time soon (unlikely), I'll try to sketch something up. But... don't hold your breath -- I'm trying to buy a house right now. That'll give me the chance to go from crazy fishkeeper to freaking-bat-crap-loony fishkeeper.

But... if you are looking at mesh, one thing to check is needlepoint mesh at a Jo-Anne fabric or similar. It's a molded nylon mesh which comes in a variety of mesh sizes. Because it's molded, you might need to do some reaming out of the holes to clean up mold defects. But... it should be much easier to clean and potentially less damaging to fish that a welded metal mesh.
I need to add this info to the "Frugal Fishkeeping" thread sometime: http://forum.nanfa.o...p?showtopic=228
 needlepoint_mesh.jpg   24.93KB   0 downloads

-Jase