Fish Farm with Cages!

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OBTAINING YOUR FISH

There are three ways to obtain your fish stock: buy them, catch them, or breed them. You should be able to locate dealers who sell channel catfish, rainbow trout, hybrid sunfish, Israeli carp, and even some of the tilapias. You may also be able to find folks who deal in some of the other species I mentioned ... but don't count on it.

To find out where to buy fish stock, try the 1983 Buyer's Guide (it's available, for $7.00 postpaid, from Aquaculture Magazine, Dept. TMEN, P.O. Box 2329, Asheville, North Carolina 28802), which is a comprehensive source of information on aquaculture tools, supplies, and services. As an alternative you can write the U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Division of Fish Hatcheries, Dept. TMEN, Washington, D.C. 20240 and ask for its free lists of suppliers (by state). [EDITOR'S NOTE: Again, some such information can be found in this issue's center spread.]

You may well be able to locate free fish for stocking ... particularly bluegills and bullheads (rapid reproducers that can quietly overpopulate a body of water if they're not kept in check). Many owners of farm ponds will be glad to relieve their fish population crunch by letting you haul away some of their "stunted" stock. Such fish will resume normal growth patterns when they're again placed under favorable-conditions.

Taking your starting supply from public waters is usually illegal, especially if you're after such prized game fish as trout. Still, it can't hurt to check with your local fishery biologist to see if he or she knows of any unwanted surpluses of bullheads or carp. Such specimens can generally be caught with seines, cast nets, or traps baited with liver, fish, or meat offal. (These methods are thoroughly covered in my upcoming book from Cloudburst Press, The Freshwater Aquaculture Book: A Manual for Small Scale Aquaculture in North America.)

Among the fishes discussed here, bullheads, nonhybrid sunfish, and tilapia will readily reproduce in any pond in which they can survive. Channel catfish and carp are a bit more particular about their breeding grounds, but most home growers should be able to get them to reproduce. However, many backyard aquaculturists consider trout to be too tricky and time consuming to breed ... while breeding hybrid sunfish requires specialized skills, and eels are unlikely to reproduce at all in captivity.

On the other hand, none of these fishes will breed in a cage that's kept properly suspended off the bottom. This seeming disadvantage is actually an advantage more often than not ... because it lessens the chance of the cage culturist encountering the all-too-common problem of stunted, overpopulated groups of fish. Indeed, such individuals who own farm ponds are in the position to "have their cake and eat it, too". The growers can use their ponds as natural hatcheries (to produce young with which to stock the cages) and the containers themselves as isolated pens to raise collections of fish to optimal eating size away from the competition present in the pond at large.

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