Rambling About Wakin
Here is the history of this batch of wakin…..
Adults held in a display pond up here at the house spawned on March 14, 2006. One female and three males. Water hyacinth were used as spawning substrate. I estimated there were at least 700 eggs.
The hyacinth with eggs were transferred to a 180-gallon stock tank….one of these….
They hatched in about 2.5 days and were “swim up” fry, ready to begin feeding, in two more days. I estimated there could be as many as 1,000 fry.
They were fed heavily with moina and rotifers being grown in some of the other stock tanks and a line of 25-gallon tubs. The rotifers and moina were grown with green water being cultured in the blue pool behind…..
Since this was the first spawn of the season, I had plenty of live feed for this batch.
On April 6th 3,600 half-inch juveniles were removed from the stock tank and hand counted. If I had any idea there were that many, I would not have put them in such a small tank. These juveniles were transferred to a small 20 ft x 6 ft x 1.5 foot deep pond. There are three such ponds in this net enclosure, but you can only see parts of two of them in the photo.
The juveniles started demelanizing soon after being transferred. On May 15th, I began catching about 100 or so juveniles each day with a dip net and sorting them. The green (still melanized) ones were put back in the same pond. The demalanized juveniles which showed the beginnings of red and white patterns were placed in separate 20 ft x 6 ft pond. The juveniles which were solid or mostly red, and solid or mostly white, were moved to an 8 ft x 8 ft x 4 feet deep pond in this area…..
On June 18th, the pond was drained and the rest of the juveniles were removed and sorted. All but 128 of the juveniles had demelanized. 910 patterned juveniles and 922 solid or mostly solid colored juveniles had been moved to other ponds. About 100 deformed fish had been discarded along the way. So, of the 3,600 going into the pond, a little over 2,000 came back out. I never saw any dead fish, but some bullfrogs moved into these ponds and it took almost a month to dispatch them. A large frog can eat about 20 fry per day.
The blue tub in the photo above is about 32 inches. These were some of the fish which were still in the pond when it was drained. The big huge ones had grown too large, too fast to be caught with the dip net. There are quite a few that size in the ponds where fish were being transferred to as they were slowly removed and sorted. The size range is 1 inch to 5 inch.
I have been watching some individual fish which demelanized early, trying to figure out how to predict the pattern development. It’s tough because the pattern is still breaking up and/or consolidating a lot when they are this size. The pattern does seem to stabilize until they are at least 3-4 inches. This is bad news for me, because there are 910 fish in a 1,300-gallon pond. To get them to grow, they need to be thinned out a lot, but I can’t decide who to keep and who to move along. To make matters worse, in the second batch of wakin 4,200 juveniles were moved to a single pond and many of those are already demelanizing and need to be thinned out. A broker thinks he has found a wholesale buyer for the solid colored group. Hopefully, they will be on their way to the chain stores in the next few weeks which will free up some space.
The other problem is that the quality of the red cannot be determined in young fish. In the photo you can see that most still have an orange, washed-out color. As the color develops, some go from orange to deep red. Others stay orange their whole life. My other selection criteria are a strong tail and good body shape (conformation). They need to be about 3-4 inches before you can have much certainty about tail and body.
So, the first selection is barely over, it’s already past time to start on the second selection, the next batch is coming along right behind them, and I’m about out of space. A recipe for disaster if there ever was one.
