Our Aquaponics System...

[geologic]

Happy critters--
all...

 

[Seamaiden]

Except for that one crawdaddy. It's got no large claws, has a whitened eye and its feelers are all chopped short. Yet it's not hiding, so it must be some kinda super-crawdaddy. I don't know, but I want to know where they *all* are. I have a feeling some left. I know I have none in the fish barrel, so I'll stop feeding it for them. They may have gotten into the main pond, or they may have simply gone truckin'.

 

[geologic]

Is that the one in the tube--
that looked like a fish was cleaning it???

 

[Seamaiden]

I'm pretty sure the fish was attacking it. If you look closely at it, it's got a clearly injured/whitened eye, so it's blind on that side. It has no large claws, making me think it got into it with another P. clarkii. And finally, all its feelers have been cut off short. So I don't think the fish was cleaning it, I think the fish was attacking it.

 

[geologic]

What happened with the--
Old Warrior Crawdad???

 

[Seamaiden]

The last video I got of it, it looked like it had shed its exoskeleton because the eyes were clear. But I've been out of town and quite busy these past few weeks, so not a lot of time to mess around and see what's going on down there lately.

A few weeks ago we became victims of our own success. I learned that you should absolutely NOT put plants with aggressive root systems in the same bed. One of our San Marzano tomatoes REALLY took off, then the flow through the bed stopped. I watched it progress, tried to nurse it along, did what I could to get flow through the bed, to no avail.

It created an anoxic region, and when I dug through into it I likely released some bad stuff (you know, the rotten egg smell), and we had a fish kill. Lost about 30 of our bluegill, so that's over half. Lost at least one of the crawdaddies as well, and one of the large goldies. I left everything in situ because it's food for the system. I added aeration by moving my AACT air pump down to the pond and dropped in my PVC rig, it's keeping things well aerated now, and now that we've pulled that tomato plant out things began improving in 24hrs.

Now that we've got things stabilized, Dave added four more planting beds to the system and I've just dropped in four newly sexed seedlings. They probably won't get far since the area isn't enclosed, but we should get something I hope, and it'll at least allow me to get some cuttings from the seedlings for next year.
(I find now that I've paid for these genetics, I'm a good deal more anal about not letting them die over the winter.) Pix will be coming in the following weeks.