Expanding system, pro's and con's...

[David M]

Right now I have an insulated climate controled room 9 X 18 with 950 gallons total water volume including sumps, I have about 30 10, 15 and 20 gallon tanks in there, a 130 and a180. I want to dedicate all that to broodstock and move the larvae and juvies to a growout system just outside the room. The question is do I connect it to the broodstock system or keep it seperate? I can see the pro's to one system, the main one being temperature controll. The new rack will probably be something like 300 gallons, if I pull off the sump in the fish room I'm done. Creating a whole seperate system will be more work and cost more, is there any real advantage to doing it? I know many people keep broodstock and growout systems seperate, why?? Insurance?

 

[ediaz]

Well my friend, with the bioload you are going to have with your success that will be really bad for your brood stock system, the water will become foamy and yellow. Imagine a system of 500 gal with about 4k cinamon clownfish, just imagine.

Ed

 

[Kathy55g]

What are you going to do with all those fish, Ed?

 

[David M]

OK, point taken. Obviously I want the best possible WQ for the breeders, I suppose that is ideal for juvies as well but they can probably take a little more abuse. The thing is I am prone to working with what I have. What I have is a 6' commercial RK2 skimmer and a 24x24x48 bio tower packed with bioballs. It was the filtration for the salt system at a lfs. That's kind of why I was leaning towards one big system/ central filtration. It would actually be easier to just make a whole new system for growout rather than revamp the one I have, so that is a plus. I suppose I could just leave the existing system alone and leave all the broodstock there, then use the heavy equipment on a growout system that will now have to be larger than 500 gallons and hold more than 4K clownfish :smokin:

 

[JHardman]

OK, here is my take on small to medium sized setups...

You biggest costs are food, water (and all that goes with that like salt, filters, etc) and power.

You will have higher survial rates and few problems in general if you maintain high water quality in the broodstock and rearing tanks. Growout tanks can handle a lot more junk in them.

So with that in mind, connecting a rearing tank system to the broadstock system and maintaining the broodstock water in a cycle of being the first to get new water is best.

Recycle your water from the broadstock to the growout and the growout to the drain.

Connectin the broadstock to the growout... Something always rings in my mind... "You can easily replace 20K fish in growout, it takes a long time to replace 1 spawning pair."

 

[clownfish75]

Im with JHardman you can always replace a juvenile even many thousands but to replac eone pair is very hard.

I owuld run 2 seperate systems mostly for water quality issues, and if you have one system murphys law says that the juvs are the ones that get sick, they then give it to your broodstock and the disease kills the broodstock not the juvs.

Christian

 

[David M]

OK I'm already convinced, seperate it will be. I think the filtration on the current (900 gallon) system can easily handle say 30-35 pairs so I really don't have to make any changes, just build a new "growout" system and move the juvies to it, easy Larvae are isolated so they aren't a factor, I put them on the system at about 25 days.

 

[Morgman]

Speaking from experience here,

Now the real question is where are you going to put all of your tools?

 

[David M]

Well my wife says I can't put them all over the living room and patio like you do so yes, it IS a problem :lol:

 

[RCS]

I'd be a little leery of connecting both as well (from the sounds of it you don't need any more convincing though, and I haven't got to that stage of my setup yet). If, heaven forbid, the system crashes, everything goes. It's not likely, but it does happen. With separate systems you've got some redundancy built it. Even if the worst happens and the broodstock system goes, you've got the growout, and vice-versa.

Always lookin' on the bright side! :eek1:

 

[Kathy55g]

Newbie Question: If you have brood stock system for 30 pairs, and they are all brooding, it doesn't sound like you will have enough tanks in growout to accomodate their production. I have one breeding pair, and I'm thinking I need about 12 tanks of the 10 gallon variety to accomodate all the spawns and grow out. With 30 pairs, needing at least a conservative 10 tanks per pair, you would need 300 tanks or a combination of big and small tanks with about 3000 gallons to keep them all in production, and grow out the larvae for 4 months.

Your one pair is giving you 400 fish every 11 days, so that's about 1200 fish a month, for 4 months at 10 fish per gallon, you need 480 gallons growout for that one pair. Granted, you can squish the little larvae together, but the last month of each brood will need 10 fish per gallon. So say, 3 twentys and a 40, that's 100 gallons just for the one pair. You've got 30 pairs?
Maybe you could keep broodstock in the 300 gallon system, and keep growout in the 950 gallon room.

 

[David M]

Kathy, in another thread I explained this, the 30 pairs are "insurance". Nobody says all 30 are going to spawn or produce good (large) nests. Even if several of them did nobody says I have to pull them all. Right now I have the opportunity to build a small wholesale business with just the one pair, my tagret goal is 1000/ month to start with the capacity to double that, I can't see keeping up with anything more on my own. However it would be nuts to reley on one pair, anything can happen. So I have 9 more pairs of oc's as backup and will pick up a few more as I find nice ones. (only one of them has just begun to spawn) Then I want to have some variety as well, so I have 3 nice pairs percs, 1 pair Picasso percs, 3 pairs gsm's, 2 pairs tomato's (both spawning), 2 pairs malenapos, orchid dotyybacks, arabian dottybacks, bangaii cardinals, bluestreak cardinals... more to come

Also just because I can sell oc's at 4 months does not mean I may necessarily want to. If I can get ahead of my demand for a month or two and have sufficient growout capacity I can offer larger fish. It will not be long before somebody else inadvertently raises some clowns in their garage, and they are gonna go straight to MY customers with them. :mad2: If my fish are bigger and better looking, and I have enough reserve to completely fill my customers demand in the long run, and I have a "hook" like cb bangaii's or dottybacks, they are gonna stick with me and send that new guy packing

Last thought, I notice that ORA occasionally releases some quite large ocellaris, way bigger than the usual. Of course I don't know what their deal is but I have two thoughts on this. 1) they have reserve fish for when production is down or 2) they periodically grow out a good number, select future broodstock from them and then dump the rest. Either plan makes good sense to me, sell on a last in- first out basis and you always have the best fish as reserve. From them you can cherrypick future broodstock. Also even though it may be shady in a sense you can use those bigger fish to hook new customers when you want to expand, and then wean them on to the smaller fish as needed :smokin:

 

[David M]

BTW that last part is how I started in the first place, I knew just walking in the door with a few tiny clowns was not gonna put in the position I wanted, the stores would probably offer "store credit" at best. So I didn't sell a single fish until I had hundreds (which took forever getting 20-30 per spawn at first). When I "opened for business" most of the fish I had were 6-7 months old and really wowed the stores. Once they got used to having my fish they would take them at smaller and smaller sizes, now they take 'em at 14 weeks

 

[mwp]

OK, so I'm REALLY surprised by all the comments regarding water quality - it was my experience in FW that the grow-out tanks did much better when water quality was better (i.e. they got 50-75% water changes every week). Grow out happened faster, you could pump more food through the fish and get them to market sooner. WHY are there so many folks saying (to some extent) "ah, don't worry about the grow out water quality, keep the BROODSTOCK pristine"...last I checked the adults were better able to handle poor water quality than juveniles, or is this just all TOTALLY backwards in saltwater fish breeding?

MP

 

[Kathy55g]

Yeah, one guy I met recently never siphons broodstock tanks, only growout tanks....

 

[mwp]

bluestreak cardinals

- David, have YOU cracked that nut yet? From my experience it seems that all it would really take to be more successful (besides not having to pull the male out of the reef tank to strip his eggs/larvae) would be smaller rotifers....S-Strain...thoughts?

MP

 

[David M]

I have 9 bluestreaks that do spawn regularily but have not yet attempted to recover any larvae and raise them. In fact I have not ever even seen a larvae, just males with full mouths

On the water quality issue I don't think anyone is suggesting that you should abuse the juvies, just that your priorities should be the broodstock first, the larvae second and then growout. Makes sense to me.

 

[David M]

So back to the new system, what tanks would you use? Since I seem to be getting very large hatches I'm thinking 40's are not too big, they can have removable dividers to partion them off and increase the space as the fish grow, rather than transferring them several times. 20 longs might be nice for smaller hatches. The 40's we have here are not the standard "breeder" 40, they are only 16" wide and actual capacity is 35 gallons (read the label, it says "model 40" ) So a rack approx 8' long could hold six "40's" on the lower level and 8 20L's on the top, 14 tanks for about 250 actual gallons. Say 50 gallons in the sump (rubbermade stock tank) and a 60 gal drum connected as reservior that can be drained and filled for wc's. Call it 300 gallons. I'd think that would be adaquate for the desired 1000 per month output considereing more than half the fish will be less than two months old. What do you think, cutting it too close? Bigger?

 

[David M]

Option II Considering the cost of that system (approx $1000 using some equipment I already have) I have also considered open raceways made of plywood & fiberglass. A lot cheaper to set up but it would be single level and a lot less volume. Fish would be kept in baskets.

 

[Kathy55g]

That sounds very interesting. What kind of baskets? Would that mean that you would have one vacuum to do with all the waste falling to the bottom of the common tank? I like a single layer, as I like to look down on the tanks, but that's because vacuuming is easier. Your way, practically eliminates the chore, or makes it very simple.