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  1. #1
    Members Lordshandyman's Avatar
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    Apr 2012
    Location
    Naples, FL USA
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    70

    Massive fish die off.

    Hello everyone. I have returned. Been very busy raising my baby boy, work, and keeping a garden over the last year. My ap system is over a year old now. We ate a tilapia about a month ago and I joke around and tell people that it was the best $1500 dollar fish I have ever eaten. Since I have around that much in the whole system and only have eaten one fish. Actually, we ate a second one when some of our out of town guest visited and again, it was the best fish I have ever tasted. I had eaten a few tilapia at different places and some I could tolerate and some were extremely grassy/fishy tasting... so I was pretty nervous about raising them in a closed system. I even read here on the forums that someone said that ap tilapia taste awful. I am very picky when it comes to eating fish and I found my ap tilapia to be wonderful. Actually, we cooked the whole fish, (my wife is Asian) and I found myself eating the skin, dark lateral meat, and even the fatty parts. Wonderful, absolutely downright tasty.

    Now that I am hooked on the ap tilapia, I have a problem, there dieing!

    Brief background info about my system (already posted detailed info before):
    Fishtank: IBC tote about 250 gallons. It overflows straight to the grow beds (I realized later that I need a swirl filter first) Will add one later when I revamp my system.
    Growbeds: 2 3x8x12 gravel flood and drain setup with bell siphons. (when I had only one gb, I had perfect operation of bell siphons. When I added the second gb, started having major issues with making/breaking siphons and such. I think I plumbed it with too large of pipe, or beds stop up too fast from not having a swirl filter. Growbeds then drain into a sumptank.
    Sumptank: @ 3x6x3 This then is pumped into the fishtank starting the cycle over again.

    I have (had) a male and female adult tilapia in the sumptank as breeders and lots of baby tilapia from 1" to 3" in size. Maybe 75 babies. Also there are about 20 - 30 large snails in the sumptank. I have (had) 9 adult tilapia in the fishtank with a few babies now and then. We ate two tilapia out of the fishtank recently so now there is only 7 adults and maybe two 3"-4" ones. Over the last year and a half, I haven't done much to the system other than feed the fish rolled oats, top off with water, and tend to the plants. It has been really a sweet setup and easy to maintain.

    Now to the PROBLEM:
    About 4 weeks ago, I accidentally left the water hose on while topping off the system. It probably overflowed the sumptank for a few hours. Maybe four. Well, a night or two later, I found my first dead baby 1" tilapia floating in the sump tank. First time in over a year and a half that a fish died. I did a water test and didn't see anything out of the normal. I just figured that maybe the temp had dropped a little low during the water change from all the fresh well water running in (we do have a sulfur aerator holding tank and a salt water softener for our house water, which is what I use to fill the system). Maybe even the oxygen got low too as the beds were not draining correctly, so I cleaned out half of the oldest bed and tweaked the drains to flood and drain more evenly. I replanted lots of different lettuce.

    Our temps maybe dipped down in the low 60s a few nights later. Next morning, had another dead baby. Thought that it was just a fluke. Several days later, I find a few more babies floating. Starting to get suspicious, but contributed it to the cold night a while back. I did move the water heater to the sumptank, turned it on, and set it to 65. A few more nights, same thing... except it was a lot more dead babies. And I found two baby tilapia (that I didn't even know was in the fishtank) in the growbed drain area. Both were still very alive so I put them back in the sumptank. Now my work has gotten extremely busy, so I haven't done much to the system other than raising the temp to 70, and trying to keep up with cleaning out the dead babies. Sometimes it is five at a time, or up to 10. Just when I thought I have lost all the baby ones, I find a few more dead the next day. Once again, the water test seem normal.

    Now to the devastating news:
    I found my female breeding tilapia upside down this morning, freshly dead in the sumptank. I removed her and examined the gills, they look perfect. She has some color missing from her tail and a few scuff marks across some scales, but other than that, perfect. Eyes are very clear. In fact, I was tempted to put her in the oven. But, to the compost bin she went since I don't know why she died. I collected some water from the drain pipes of both beds and am posting the results here in hopes of maybe saving my other 8 adults.

    It looks like the ph is 7.6, Ammonia 0, Nitrite 0, Nitrate 15

    I will test the ph three times a day now, to see if I am getting huge swings.
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    Trust God, after all, only He knows what He is doing.

    Random Thoughts: There is some truth in every newspaper and magazine, you just need to know where to look....
    For instance: The name, price, date, and page numbers are usually always true!

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