Hello and welcome to another video in our series on aquaponics.
Ttoday I'd like to discuss adding pet store fish to your aquaponic system,
without destroying the delicate ecosystem that's already in place.
Some of you who are already familiar with keeping fish,
will undoubtedly be aware of a few of the steps I'm about to show you.
That being said, there are a few subtle differences when adding to an aquaponics
system versus adding to your standard home aquarium.
As always you're gonna wanna take your fresh batch of fish
and float it in the water for a while.
To allow the two temperatures, to come together.
This helps prevent startling your fish, or shocking them, when they enter rather
significantly warmer or significantly cold waters.
I'm gonna let these fish float for about twenty minutes to adjust the temperature.
As you can see from the fog inside the bag with the new fish
there is a definite different in the two temperatures.
By floating this bag,
we allow those two water temperatures to come closer together before
transporting the fish from one
to the other.
Aside from the temperature difference, there's also bound to be a difference in
the chemical structure of the water.
In the fish tanks at the store,
these fish will often be treated with various chemicals
just to keep them healthy and 'fresh'
so that when they are consumed by other fish in similar environments, they are
the best possible food available.
Now we don't necessarily want those chemicals in our fish tank affecting the
nature of our plants,
or possibly going into the food that we as humans are going to consume.
In order to eliminate that cross-contamination,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to add the water that came from the pet store
to some water that was already in my fish tank,
and allow the fish swim around in there and have
sort of a half and half
so that they become accustomed
to a slightly different water before they get transferred completely into the
aquaponics tanks.
Hopefully by doing this, I'll reduce the overall stress that the fish have to go
through as they're getting accustomed to their new environment.
Okay,
now that we've adjusted temperature of the water
inside the bag
it's time to pour out the fish.
I've found a lot of times these fish
love to get caught
in the corner
and I always worry about suffocation so what I do
is I cut the corner off of the bag here,
then pour them out through it.
[water pouring]
and I've found this
eliminates fish getting caught in the corner.
Here again I want to take a few moments to allow the fish to get more
comfortable with the changes to their water.
Once they've had some time to do that I'll transfer them into the main tanks.
Once the fish have adjusted to the new state of the water you can begin moving
them to your tanks.
The goal is still to avoid the contamination with chemicals,
so you don't want to move any of this water
over to your fish tank.
I like to use the net,
and try and be as gentle as I can.
Happy productive fish!
So, basically, that's all you need to worry about when you're adding pet store fish to your aquaponics
system.
First, make sure you're buying healthy fish.
Second, let the water temperature adjust so their equal.
Third, place the fish into a combination of the two waters
and allowed them to adjust.
And finally, fourth,
net they fish out and put them in
allowing no water transfer
to stop any chemicals
from entering your aquaponics system.
If you follow these four simple steps,
your fish will survive,
you plants will be happy, and you'll be enjoying a thriving garden,
in no time at all.
Thanks for watching and have a great day!