Minnows in the hydroponic tank
The pH
in my aquaponics setup keeps fluctuating and trending alkaline,
which left me with a bit of a conundrum. I have a feeling what I need
is to put a few fish in to get the biology really working. But I'm
leery of driving an hour to the fish store for finned friends who will
likely end up dead.
Then I had a thought. We
live in limestone country and our streams are quite alkaline. In fact,
when I tested our creek water, I discovered it was actually sweeter
than the water in our aquaponics tank (8.2 versus 7.8). Maybe some
minnows would survive well enough to get my system up and running?
My first attempted
failed miserably. No, not because the tank killed the fish. I captured
one small minnow and didn't notice until I got the bucket home that
there was also a hefty caddisfly larva who had come along for the
ride. "Well, that'll be fun to observe," I thought and put the two
together into a small container to let the water rise to room
temperature before introducing them to the tank.
An hour later, the fish
was gone. Apparently caddisfly larvae eat baby fish. See, I'm learning
things already!
Anyway, I headed back to
the creek and scooped up two larger minnows the second time around. I
figured I could always put them back if they survive and I want to
upgrade later. But, to my surprise, these minnows are less shy and more
entertaining than the guppies were. So maybe my aquarium will turn into
a native fauna observation tank?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Sounds better on many fronts.
I've always wondered (but never looked up), are minnows baby fish or full grown?
Jim --- "Minnow" is a general term often used for fish in the Cyprinidae family. There are so many of them that are so hard to tell apart when they're not breeding that I've never tried to track down specific species. Here's a list of the 67 minnows found in Virginia in case you're more ambitious than I am. I suspect mine are daces of some sort...but I could be wrong.
Kayla --- You always make me smile.
I think I was feeling a bit mischievous in this picture because Mark was cutting firewood and I was playing in the creek....