Today, in Australia, it’s basically the beginning of winter.
You know, we are in this transition between summer and winter.
So the temperatures were very high a few months ago.
And now we are going through the cold days and the temperature of the water in my aquaponics
setups here is dropping dramatically.
My fish are becoming less active and some of them developed some fungus.
And that’s what we’re going to see today in this video.
We’re going to see how to save your fish, how to basically take care of your fish if
they get some fungus.
So you know that the activity of the fish, the metabolism activity of the fish is completely
dependent on the water because they are what we call cold-blood animals.
So the blood of the fish is going to be dependent on the temperature of the water so in winter,
when the temperature is low, the blood of the fish is low as well in terms of temperature.
Therefore, all the activities inside the body you know, all the bacteria are going to digest
-- all the enzymes that are going to digest the food they’re not going to be active.
So the fish are not eating much in winter, depending on the species you know.
Every species of fish has got a specific range of temperature.
When you go in the bottom of the range, some fish are becoming less active and therefore,
they don’t eat much or sometimes they just stop eating completely.
So during winter, they just live on their reserves.
And that’s very important to understand.
It means that if your fish are stressed, they’re going to use all their reserves and then they’re
not going to have enough energy to go through winter.
So it’s very important to avoid any stress for the fish during winter and to keep, to
maintain the reserve of the fish, the energy of the fish at the highest level.
So decrease the stress.
Try to maintain the temperature as high as possible if you can.
So most of the time in aquaponics, we don’t have a lot of chances to increase the temperature
of the water, but if you have a small setup, you can insulate the setup or you can even
sometimes use a little fish heater, aquarium fish heater, you know, that you put in your
setup and just to maintain the water at 12 degrees during winter, you know, depending
on the species you have.
But just make sure that you are just above the minimum range of the fish in terms of
temperature.
So here in Australia, in Melbourne, I got some silver perch in my setups and silver
perch are native fish.
In winter, they just go in the bottom of the rivers, in the bottom of the dams and they
just wait for summer to come back.
So they just stay and remain alive, thanks to the reserve they have.
In aquaponics, the fish are kept in very small fish tanks so just make sure you don’t stress
them because if you got kids around, or people around that are opening the fish tanks, disturbing
the fish, the fish are going to be stressed.
They’re going to try to find a way to go away.
There is no way for them to go away because they are in the fish tank.
So they’re going to use a lot of energy, you know.
They’re going to be stressed.
Their heartbeat is going to increase.
They’re going to use all the energy they have and then they become very weak.
So if there is any disease like fungus, bacteria, or virus that is coming, so you know that
in winter, we don’t have so many bacteria but we have a lot of fungus on the fish.
So the fungus is a type of mushroom that is growing on the surface of the fish, on the
skin of the fish.
So you can really see it.
It’s very easy to identify.
When you see a bit of white mold on the top of the fish, that’s fungus.
And that’s why you need to act.
So today, I want to give you two advices.
Well, it’s three.
The first one was to try to maintain the temperature at a good range but it’s very hard to do
if you are doing aquaponics outside if your setup is not well insulated.
If it’s the case, yes, you can put a little aquarium heater.
Don’t raise it because you want to stay sustainable so try to consume the lowest quantity
of power possible.
But just try to maintain the water temperature above 12 degrees.
But then, the other thing is you know that in water there is this reaction called osmosis.
So osmosis is basically an ability that has got the water to always go from the less concentrated
to the more concentrated solution.
So just to explain to you in water, here in the fish tank, you got some freshwater and
you got some fish.
So freshwater has a very low quantity of sodium inside.
If you don’t add any salt in your aquaponics setup, there are very few salts available
in the water.
While inside the body of the fish, it’s very high in sodium.
There are a lot of minerals, a lot of salt inside the body of the fish.
So the water is always trying to go from the fish tank to the inside of the body of the
fish.
So the fish always have to regulate this osmosis and therefore, it consumes some energy to
do that.
So the solution is to add a little bit of salt into your water.
So we are still in fresh water.
Right?
Fresh water is normally zero grams of salt per liter of water.
While in saltwater, we are around 35 grams of salt per liter of water.
You know, when we talk about the sea, the ocean, they are around 35.
So here what we’re going to do is we’re going to try put our setups at 3 grams of
salt per liter of water which is less than -- 10 times less what we got in the sea.
But it’s going to be enough to help our fish because what you need to understand is
that the osmosis power is going to be dependent on the variation of concentration between
the salt that you have in your fish tank and the salt you have in your fish.
And the higher this difference is, and the higher the power of the osmosis is going to
be.
But if you increase this by 3 grams, it’s going to decrease the power of the osmosis
significantly.
And therefore, the fish are going to be way more relaxed.
So why don’t we put 35 grams per liter?
This is simply because first the fish, some fish are not going to survive in this quantity
of salt.
But the problem is especially for the vegetables, you know, the vegetables they are sensitive
to salt.
If you have too much salt they are not going to grow and they may die.
So the limits that I’m going to fix is basically the strawberries, they are very sensitive
and the limit is 5 grams of salt per liter of water.
So we’re going to remain way below, and we’re going to use only 3 grams of salt
per liter of water.
It’s perfect for the fish, perfect for the plant, no problem.
And it’s going to decrease the osmosis power.
In order to do that, we’re going to use some classic salt.
So here, I’ve got some salt that is used normally for a swimming pool.
So you see this type of salt are light, something like 20 kilo-bags for something like $6.
So it’s very, very cheap.
Just make sure that you use a salt that hasn’t been treated with chemicals.
You want a salt that is natural, you know, the salt from the sea, so sea salt.
But don’t buy it in the shop for human consumption because it’s too expensive.
This one you buy 20 kilos for $6.
So it’s very, very cheap.
And it’s perfect for the job.
Three kilos of salt for 1000 liters of water that you have in your aquaponics setup.
So if you got 1000 liters of water, put 3 kilos.
If you have only 500 liters, you put only 1.5 kilos and whatever the volume is you do
the conversion.
So now, this is going to help.
Right?
And also it’s going to help to keep the fungus away because the fungus don’t like
salt.
But if your fish are already infected with fungus, what we’re going to do is we’re
going to fish the fish and we’re going to put them in a bucket of water and in this
water we’re going to add some salt.
We’re going to add 10 grams of salt per liter of water.
So in this bucket, I’m going to put 50 liters of water and I know that I want to have 10
grams per liter of water which means that I’m going to put 500 grams of salt inside
this bucket.
So I’m going to add the salt.
In this case, that’s what we call a salt bath.
We’re going to give a salt bath to our fish for an hour.
We’re going to add an air stone inside the bucket and we’re going to make sure that
the fish are going to remain in good condition so we keep an eye on the fish.
We want to make sure that they are still okay.
You know, it’s not going to affect them.
We want basically to treat all fungus.
We want to make sure we remove all the fungus but we want to make sure the fish are not
going to die.
So you need to keep an eye on the fish because they’re going to be stressed again.
A lot of fish, and high concentration of salt.
You need to make sure that you got enough oxygen and you may need to keep an eye on
them.
If you can keep for an hour, in this salt bath, it’s perfect but just keep an eye
on them and see.
You know, if you see that after 30 minutes they stop to struggle just stop it.
And then you can renew it, you know.
You can do it once, twice, three times and every time you know, you should reduce the
population of fungus on your fish.
When you do that, just be very careful to not remove the slime from the skin of your
fish.
So use a net that is fish-friendly, not a net that is rough, not a net that is tissue
that is going to remove all the slime.
Right?
You want the net, as smooth as possible.
So while the fish are in the salt bath, that’s a really good time to observe the fish.
If you see some fish with a lot of fungus and some fish that are just turning, you know,
they are just struggling to stay alive, and if it has nothing to do with the oxygen, just
put those fish aside and keep them away from your fish tank basically.
If you have another tank, put them in another tank, but those fish are probably going to
die anyway.
So if you leave them in your fish tank, they’re going to be your source of fungus for the
other fish.
So just put them away from the fish tank and try to take care of them.
If you can, give them another salt bath more frequently.
Try to increase the concentration of salt, depending on the species.
Some fish such as tilapia or barramundi can live both in fresh and saltwater so you can
go up to 35 grams of salt per liter even over that, but for most of freshwater fish, 10
grams per liter is a good concentration.
So just stay within this concentration of salt and just continue to dip your fish into
the salt bath and hopefully, it’s going to fix the issue.
But you know, it’s better to remove the few fish that are already almost dying than
trying to keep them and having all your fish that are contaminated.
So when you have fish that are very sick normally you need to take them away and put them in
a special tank where basically, you try to save them.
But don’t keep them in the same tank as the others.
So I imagine that this video is going to be very useful for some of you.
I hope your fish are not going to fall sick.
But you know, it’s very usual to basically have some fish that get weak and develop fungus.
So it’s not something exceptional and you need to be prepared for this thing because
it may happen in your aquaponics setup.
So just by watching this video I think the step is very simple, you know.
You fish your fish.
You put them in a salt bath at 10 grams of salt per liter of water.
And it’s going to remove a lot of fungus from you fish.
And obviously, you put your fish back because it’s going to stress them and in a week’s
time if it doesn’t go better, you can continue it.
You can do it again and again and again.
So by doing so you really decrease the concentration or the quantity of fungus that are present
on your fish.
The problem is if you do it too often, you stress them all the time so there is a decrease
as well.
So in aquaculture, we use a lot of other chemicals to get rid of the fungus and one of them is
potassium permanganate.
So potassium permanganate is very efficient to get rid of fungus but it’s a very toxic
chemical so I don’t want to advise you to use those types of things.
You know, normally in aquaponics, we should able to work without any chemical and without
any specific minerals that are very aggressive for the fish.
So try to stay away from that.
If you really can’t get rid of it with salt, you can use Methylene Blue, but again, that’s
normally very much used in ornamental fish you know, in your aquarium.
In a fish pond I prefer to stay away from those products.
If you can just do some salt bath without any other thing, it’s much better.
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to build your own aquaponics setup in the best conditions, I offer you a guide, a six-step
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