Biology Question

[WAbedroomponics]

I want to look back on my life and know I did what I could to help our environment. I have always grown up shrimping, crabbing, clam digging, salmon fishing and pretty much any other lake, ocean or forest type of activity. ALL of these we will lose if people who have the passion and the ability to comprehend bio/chemistry don't do something.

[foodchain]

I started out in Marine Biology with an emphasis in Macro. I grew up just west of you further out on the Peninsula and got hooked on this stuff from the salmon hatcheries out there as a kid. The above mentioned material is valuable, and you should grasp at least a basic concept of biology. There's several community colleges in your area to consider contacting. Even one right out on Whidbey Island near the Naval Air Station. I looked at attending there when I came home from the service. There's some small ones out on the Peninsula too that should be able to point you in the right direction...There's a lot of information available for free from ext. offices via PDF format, as well as what's listed on this site.
As far north as you are, I would scrap the Tilapia idea. And look at yellow perch, bluegill, or rainbow trout. Trout was one I started with at about 8 years old. And there's plenty of fingerlings in the streams around you.
However, I still believe nothing replaces simply rolling your sleeves up and getting wet. And pay attention to what you see/observe.

[urbanfarmer]

Those courses are recorded lectures from MIT for chemistry and biology. They were actual courses taught. The books are in the syllabus section of the website. You can basically follow along as if you were in the course (use your imagination).

If you have any other questions or need some more direction, feel free to ask. We're here to help!

[WAbedroomponics]

I wrote off tilapia a LONG time ago lol I have been raising guppies in my system and am going to try to breed angel fish in my system because my plants always keep my nitrates low enough and it keeps the ph perfect and my local stores will give me 1 buck cash 2 buck credit for a angel. I am gonna read those tilapia books though because im sure I will learn something interesting

[Shas]

If you run into problems with your angels,
feel free to drop me a line.
I used to supply the metro Vancouver area with them,
and kept 16,000 young ones in my tanks.
I might still remember a trick or two.
I think your water is the same as vancouver
(very soft and fairly acidic)
and they loved it.

My special project was attempting to breed
completely black lace veil-tails
I suppose there are lots of those nowadays
but at that time it had not been done.
The black colour plus two recessive genes
was challenge enough,
but those genes appeared to be linked to some others
which interacted synergistically in a negative way.
Producing two out of three wasn't difficult,
but all three targets phenomes together was rare,
and the resultant individuals tended to be small and delicate.
I did get a few black lace veiltail couples to spawn,
but the hatching rate was very low
and none of the fry survived to the laterally compressed body shape.

Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble on.
Your project brings back a lot of memories.
Good luck with it!

Oh, and I don't know what today's market prices are,
but I used to sell wholesale at the dime-size and quarter-size,
and my price was exactly twice the price
of the Hong Kong/Singapore imports.
The reason for that was that the long-distance shipping
had a fifty percent mortality rate
plus mine were local, vibrantly healthy,
and came with a full replacement guarantee
which was rarely abused.
And I always added around 10% extra fish
as a sort of good-will policy.
So make a friend of a per=t shop owner/employee,
find out what they are paying the asian factory farms,
and charge twice that price.
As I said earlier, these little babies paid for my biology degree!

[WAbedroomponics]

I am going to pick up two pairs on Saturday and hopefully they are good looking

[foodchain]

I tried the black lace veils in the late 80's early 90's. I too had the same problem of slow growth and development. They seemed fragile and would die off quickly. Exact opposite of the silvers/standards. I also had more trouble getting the laces to breed to begin with. Very picky. I faired fairly well with Krebinsis, and that lead me to the whole chichlid world....And man can you have some fun there. I ran danios, and white clouds during the summer months in outdoor tanks on the peninsula up there with no problems at all.
Now that I am in the south, I play a lot with discus. The price per fish is a lot higher...for the same amount of work. I have found through the use of peat instead of acid I can force the PH lower if needed. But I agree, WA water is already very low ph to begin with.

[Shas]

Ah, discus.
What beautiful animals.
I was looking at some the other day
and was astonished at the solid blues
and the reds (REDS!) that are being bred today.

I bred mollies, gouramis, oscars, and bettas a bit
(and guppies for feeders)
but the only thing I was ever in to in a big way was angels.
I loved those little guys-
so intelligent and elegant
and with really interesting social behaviours.

I'd still be breeding them,
but we moved inland
and the pH of our creek water is a solid 8.0.
I swore decades ago that would never get involved
in anything that required significant alteration of the water
(which is how we got into breeding rodents and birds,
but that's another long story.)

I'm with you on using peat to reduce pH.
Beats the hell out of acids and works as a relatively long-term buffer.

[foodchain]

Only thing I don't like about peat is the water staining. Filtering through fine particulates helps some but doens't reolve it. Once it's tea colored, it seems to stay that way.
I work mostly with the blue diamond/red snakeskin cross. Very nice deep blue with bright red striations. Somewhat of a highfin, not quite diamond. Very very similar to angels in many ways. But command much higher prices, and once you get the hang of it, I find them easier to breed. Excellent type to start honing your skills on conditioning water, breeding pairs, and learning to push the envelop on hatch sizes and hatch survival.

But I have done most chichlids, a great many livebearers my favorite being sword tails. @ 6 years old I bred my first fish, pineapple swords...first hatch, and only hatch I has a siamese twin at the belly. Never heard of it before, never seen it since. They didn't live. This led to the tiny egg layers...started with danios here, as they could live outside during the summers in WA.

I had huge amounts of progress with phenotypes. Especially in breeding a blue convict cichlid.
After learning the basics, the price I could get for my babies drove which species I kept. After all its the same amount of work when you get a nickel each or $50 each...
This in turn led me to marine species and culturing their food from lab cultures...daphnia, micro worms, vinegar eels, walter worms, green water, brine shrimp, etc. And then to corals and fragology....marine inverts was/is a blast. But rarely live to adults. Just a hair beyond my expertise.

Now I mess mostly with game/food fish and inverts in a happy balance of polyculture. I work it in an AP format, but unlike most people I use the AP side to filter out excess nutrients and that's about it. After all this is how AP came to be...or so I read. My reasoning: 1 lb of lettuce is what...$1 and change? 1 lb tilapia is about $3 depending on quantity and time of year. Catfish is about the same, and the prawns I get between $15-20 a lb also depending on quantitiy and time of year. My point is, from a financial standpoint....I would be dirt poor if I was just growing lettuce. But lettuce/basil, etc is the cheapest filter I have found yet. Now add in strawberries, ornamentals, etc and you start seeing a steeper rate of return on your investments. Limitations only seem to be in how fast, and at what lb/lb conversion ratios I can mantain. Brings to the other thread on here about food. To maximise yeild of return, I push my system harder than I probably should. And do things I probably shouldn't as they are unecassary risky....but the potential of return to me exceeds the risk.

[Shas]

Only thing I don't like about peat is the water staining. Filtering through fine particulates helps some but doens't reolve it. Once it's tea colored, it seems to stay that way.

I kinda like that, though.
In fact, for a while there I was buying a product...
nope, can't recall the name of it now,
but it purported to be a concentration of the tannins and so on
that perfuse the waters of the Amazon basin.
It made the water a dim tea colour
which made the angels a bit difficult to see,
and correspondingly confident and at ease.

once you get the hang of it, I find (discus) easier to breed.

To breed, perhaps, but the breeders I knew back then
were scrambling to keep survival and developmental rates of the fry up,
as they were dependant upon the mucous of the parents for nutrition...?

This in turn led me to marine species and culturing their food from lab cultures...daphnia, micro worms, vinegar eels, walter worms, green water, brine shrimp, etc.

Geeze, if I had a dollar for every million artemia and drosophila I raised.
I learned to hate those darned fruit flies.
I got sick of slimy banana and sour pablum.

...unlike most people I use the AP side to filter out excess nutrients and that's about it.

Yes, I'm a bit surprised that aquarists are not using enhanced "sand filters"
as grow beds as grow beds to surround their aquaria
with lush greenery representative of their fish's natural environment.
It seems like a 'natural' to me.

My point is, from a financial standpoint....I would be dirt poor if I was just growing lettuce.

I'm not so sure.
My AP motivation began as an exercise in self-reliance
(and an excuse to raise fish again)
but with the bourgeoning enthusiasm
for eating locally, organically, and with a minimal footprint
the produce side of the operation may become the most lucrative
(except for those with the ability to grow expensive aquatic life, of course).
Tom and Paula Speraneo were early AP pioneers
and have been showing a profit for something like 30 years now.
Tom is gone now,
but he calculated that he was producing and selling
something like sixty pounds of produce
for every pound of tilapia.
Your fish bring in much more per pound,
but you can harvest several crops of green food
while those fish are growing to marketable size.
With a big handful of caveats thrown in there, of course.