TA Aquaculture
Newsletter No. 1

This is the first newsletter we have put out. I have had past experience of being editor for the British Killifish Association newsletter & have helped out here over the years.
Basically these newsletters will be put out as & when time permits to keep you all up to date with new developments in the business & new products we are selling.
I like to play around with new products in the fish house & evaluate their usefulness. This newsletter is a great place to expand on research rather than the limited confines of the website.
Some useful tips in fishkeeping will be put in along the way along with little experiments & photographs.
I think we have a unique website with some of the best products you can give your fish.
In the coming months we will have another fish house built & hope to expand into fish imports again to provide properly quarantined wild fish to our customers. Wild fish unfortunately do come in with all sorts of problems & require proper treatment.
We are fortunate to have many contacts worldwide. Some are collecting from virgin areas soon so it's going to be interesting to see what they find. New Killies have already been found for example. These have been selling for £75 a pair - they are that special.

I started work in a fish importers some 37 years ago so I'm pretty sure I've got the hang of it by now.
It takes a while to set up an operation to distribute live fish to our customers in the UK but research has given us a reliable carrier system now which specialises in the transport of live fish.
Many people do not realise that Royal Mail do not accept live fish in their postal system. We aim to ship fish out in a responsible manner through our carrier.

So What's New...
We are currently working on building a new fish house on the same lines as the one featured in the section 'Fish house' on the site.
This has proved back breaking as the site contained a solid brick wall which had to be knocked down & a decent sized tree which had to be felled along with the roots being dug out.
An older fish house had to be dismantled which weighed a ton. This was passed on to Sam who is carrying on the work of breeding fish.
Currently the walls are constructed & in place. If the rain would stop for just one day I could get the Polycarbonate roof on.
This shed will be a dry goods storage & packing area. Orders are getting quite numerous now (& for this we thank you all) so it's time to consolidate into a specialised building. The wife has been very tolerant but storage in the house is getting a strain.
The storage of boxes & packaging materials is also taking up a lot of space.
More foods are now being stored in refridgerators which takes up space. The new shed will house more fridges to maximise shelf life & ensure customers get foods at the peak of freshness.

New Products…

I'm a killie breeder of old & immediately saw the potential of this little sponge filter.
It looks like a dumpy, squat little thing but that's its strength. It's a high turnover filter with a fine grade sponge. Loads of surface area for nitrifying bacteria to coat.
Suitable for a pair of fish (killies etc) in a 2-3 gallon tank or use it in a large margarine container to raise fry on hatching.
TIP - set the filter up in the parents tank for a few days & then put it in the tub you are raising the fry. The sponge gets coated in nitrifying bacteria to seed the nitrogen cycle in the tub.
A lot of fry can produce enough ammonia in a small container to be a problem if starting from fresh.
TIP - keep the water on the acid side (below pH7). At this level the ammonia becomes ammonium which is less toxic.
It's a good idea to have a few of these filters around & never transfer a filter with killies especially to another species or populations tank or you could inter breed the fish & contaminate the line.
Some fish don't tolerate water changes & can die if changes are done too fast. TIP To change water gradually place a tub of rain or aged tapwater containing a spawning mop above your fry tub & dangle a strand of the mop into or just above your fry tub. Capillary action very slowly transfers fresh water into the fry tub. It takes a bit of practice to know how fast the transfer goes but the rule is to make sure the fry tub can hold the contents of the fresh water tub.
We use 'Kick Start' to sterilise our nets & equipment. It is really powerful & able to kill Foot & Mouth Disease in cattle for which DEFRA endorses it. It's also recommended in the aquaculture industry.This is a versatile disinfectant we now use as standard in our breeding operation.
Not only will it kill just about any bug you can mention but it can be used as an egg soak to kill off fungal spores & other nasties you don't want around in egg containers.
It's so powerful a dose of 1/250 parts of water exposure can be no longer than 50 seconds or the eggs will disintegrate.
This does work. A mate in Yorkshire was having trouble getting viable eggs from a pair of killies. After using 'Kick Start' he was getting viable eggs. I've also found this in the case of a big pair of Rivulus magdalenae which continually layed fungused eggs. I saved enough to get fry & continue the line.
We are currently looking at new chemicals in powdered forms & will put our findings in future newsletters.

Artemia Disinfectant…
We got this straight from the big boys in Artemia (Brine Shrimp) hatching / growing. Used extensively by commercial shrimp farmers to prevent introduction of Vibrio which is a bacteria known to be present in hatches of Artemia eggs.
It's not a cheap product to buy in as it has to be imported.
We experimented extensively with it & found it to work extremely well. Hatches using the disinfectant remained clear & no surface scum was present in the hatching jars.
The downside we found was it took about 12 hours longer to get a good hatch. Not sure why this is but it's easy enough to plan ahead to get continual hatches.

These are some photos we took -

The introduction of Vibrio into freshwater fishes containers is perhaps not too much of a concern but those wishing to introduce hatches to saltwater set ups or species requiring salt in the water will definitely find this product useful.
Note the blue airline. This is silicone airline. We use this as it takes longer than the usual clear airline to block up. Tip Use silicone airline but still clean the inside of the pipe
regularly. Most hatches fail where the pipe is left to clog up. You return home to feed your fish & find a cloudy mess due to the air being blocked off.

Brine Shrimp Hatchers…
Some years ago we messed about with wooden blocks & plastic bottles to hatch brine shrimp eggs. The Americans were thinking along the same lines & came up with a base unit you can screw a plastic bottle into with an airline attachment.
Many breeders are ordering these hatchers who have thought along the same lines & made up wooden blocks. It would appear these split after a while. Why go to the bother in making a wooden block when you can get a sturdy plastic job for a few quid?

Simple to use & it works well. Will take a 1 - 3 litre size bottle. Ideal for those with a single tank in the front room with usual community fish. Now you can give them live food in their diet. Fish house owners buy these 3 or more at a time. The eggs you get with the package are San Francisco Brand & are proving really good hatchers. San Francisco Bay Brand put out good products & this is one of them. Talking about Brine Shrimp eggs we are now importing more than ever from Siberia. It's been a hard road convincing breeders these eggs are good as Russian eggs had (in the past) a bad reputation due to primitive storage & packaging methods. No more, as the pouches we get now are well packed & flushed with nitrogen to keep them free of degrading actions. Also, they are packed with a preserver which is used in human food preservation in red meats & is harmless to shrimp & fish. I think this is the only Artemia egg packaging to use this.

It all goes to producing good quality eggs in top of the range packaging for a really good price.
We go to many shows & talk with customers who regularly buy these eggs.
I had one complaint by a customer who couldn't hatch them. We narrowed it down to his using them direct from the fridge. In these circumstances the eggs take 12-24 hours longer to hatch.
We always recommend excluding all air from open pouches & putting them in the fridge. Take out enough for a weeks supply & put in the fish house or at room temperature. This speeds up hatching & doesn't affect the eggs. Some breeders have gone to the extreme & left open containers in their fish houses to test the eggs out. I was amazed to hear from a breeder who did this & had good hatches 12 months later!
Another tip in hatching eggs is to put the container in direct sunlight. Artemia appreciate light to give good hatches.
Growing on brine shrimp is really difficult. You can do it now & again but not consistently. I have grown them on using marine liquifry & later green water in a greenhouse. It's not an easy job.
I look at them doing their job for fish up to 1" (2.5cm). Young fish need high HUFA foods (Highly Unsaturated Fatty Acids) in their diet & brine shrimp provide this.
Adult brine shrimp have proved useful in conditioning fish for spawning & if you can grow them use them to condition breeders.

Best foods to condition breeders…
The above mentioned adult brine shrimp are good. You could also try earthworm; beef heart; bloodworm or mosquito larvae.
Perhaps only hardened fish keepers dig worms out of the garden in winter months or prepare whole beef hearts for the freezer. OK - I've done it & got the tee shirt. I was given a Piranha as a kid & religiously dug up an earthworm every day through the winter (hey, we're talking the '60's here). The new flakes we are getting contain all this goodness from a tub.
We have packaging rights to these new foods in the UK & sales continue to rise with many customers now reordering. It cost a real packet to set these foods up & get the rights to distribute but a friend & myself now have sole packaging rights in the UK to distribute these flakes.
White worm & Grindal worm are useful to put body on fish but the foods mentioned above are the definite triggers.
More on culturing foods in coming issues. How cultures fail & how to prevent it etc.

Some years ago I put up some hints & tips for fish keeping perhaps not written in any book. This was worked on along with Alan Green - an old mate from years back. We still get people coming up to us to say how good the information was so I thought it would be good to carry on along these lines in this newsletter & bring back some of these old topics & introduce some new ones.

Aphanius & Malta…
Last year (2006) I visited Malta to try & track down the endangered Aphanius fasciatus.
They have disappeared from many biotopes but some remain. Work is being undertaken to make the Maltese Government aware of their plight.

We caught 5 young fish which were put into captive breeding programs on the Island. None were taken off the Island.
The biotope was a really nasty place as it was used by local drug takers. Needles were all around along with broken glass bottles & various rubbish. I decided not to wade out into it !!

Fish diet consisted of Mosquito larvae, Bloodworm, Shrimps & algae.
It's great to see what fish eat in the wild. So often collecting trips miss these details out.

Alan's Trip…
Alan is away again this September to Colombia, South America. We are trying to get something special going this trip in the form of newsletters with photos being put together on a regular basis & made available on the website.

Photos & data will be sent out from the jungle to me to put into newsletters. Anything new which is found will be photographed & sent over. Last year some new Rivulus sp. were found which caused a stir in the UK.
We are trying to set up some direct imports through our import agent to hopefully contain fish from virgin areas. Please keep looking out for new newsletters.

This is the first newsletter. We hope to build on it with news of new products & photos of experiments in the fish house.
It's not solely an advertisement newsletter. We hope to include information on collection trips & new fish found etc.
Also more tips from us 'old boys'.
All newsletters will be freely available off the website.