New Catfish Dec 24, 2009

New tiny fish

Our year three initial order of fish.  Tiny Channel Catfish fingerlings.  Sometimes when you go to get fish, your only choice might be to get what they have on hand or get nothing at all.  So at that time we picked up what was supposed to be 100 3-5 inch fingerlings.  Most of them were definitely sub sized though and there were actually 140 in the bag.

Grow fast little guys

These fingerlings were definitely under sized.  Very small fingerlings/fry don’t survive cold as well as larger catfish do.  It isn’t the cold that will kill small catfish fry but starvation since they don’t eat much when it is cold but these little fish don’t have the energy reserves to survive weeks without eating.  It is a mistake to get really small fingerlings right at the beginning of the cold season here in Florida unless you are keeping them indoors or in a heated system for the quarantine period.

Unfortunately, these guys were in a quarantine system that was totally unheated and not in a greenhouse and in the shade!!! When the water temp got down to 32 F, I set up a small quarantine tank inside the greenhouse and froze my hands trying to catch all the remaining small fingerlings to move into a warmer environment. When I moved them into the greenhouse there were probably only 80 of them left surviving and I lost another ten due to mishaps in the smaller tank system. (the grills over the plumbing were not secured well enough and I had some pipe exploring fish which caused an overflow and a few more went over the top. I hate operating a ball valve to discover there was a fish cut in three by it.)

My new plans for getting new fish is to wait till late Feb and then start calling the fish farm to find out when they will have appropriate size stock available.