Posted by kars on June 12, 2002 at 09:31:48:
In Reply to: Re: Native Fish posted by cindy on May 31, 2002 at 10:18:21:
Wish I had found this place long ago. How long has it been going?
Anyway I have been keeping native fish for many years. I have only had a tropical rainbowfish aquarium setup for the past few years but now I am starting to setup my basement.
That's a good setup with the reverse and the canister. I am running a Emporer 400 and an Eheim 2217 on a 125 I am setting up for native fish. I also have a Supreme Aqauking I may use because I like the open box to easily add bags of carbon or whatever.
I will not lecture you on keeping them as I am also guilty but I will comment on the feeding habits. While raw beef and chicken may not harm the fish (maybe if the only source of food) it is surely not an adaquate diet. Too much fat and fatty acids for bass. Also the trout pellets are not the right formula for bass. You would be better off with cichlid pellets. Trout food are designed for trout, which live in cold water and have different nutrition requirements. I always fed meal worms, crickets, nightcrawlers, fish and craws. In one of my old tanks I had about a 20-30 gallon section divided off with food fish. I tried many from native minnows/killies to live bearing tropicals. I let them breed and had holes large enough for the small fish and too small for the adults. It was a good automatic food supplement.
I kept one bass until she was about 17" and almost 4 pounds. She was released in a private pond upstate NY. She was cought the summer before last, 6 seasons after being released, and was 9 pounds. She was released again. I had her for over two years.
I started doing this from being in State Conservation fish research programs. I got a lot of good information from the local DEC officer. I also learned a lot about bass as I was a big fisherman at the time.
I have even tried keeping trout.
: I have a 120 gallon tank with a Proquatics 2400 canister filter, and I use a second power head to reverse the flow of water into my UG filter so that the large amount of wastes produced by my native fish stay out of the gravel, hoping it will be more likely to be sucked up into the canister filter that way. It works pretty good for me.
: I have 6 bluegill, 3 green sunfish, 2 largemouth bass, one bull head catfish, 2 channel catfish, one small gar and several crayfish that spawned in February. The young are about an inch long now, and I only see them when they are dumb enough to come out during the day, about 3 seconds before they find themselves viewing the insides of my fish.
: I was able to keep a school of minnows (mostly creek chub and bleeding shiners) in the tank until most of the other fish got bigger than 4 inches, and now I settle for a second tank with them and some smaller crayfish, aquatic insects, etc. I love my native fish, they gladly eat strips of raw chicken and other raw table meats when I don't want to run to the bait shop, and most are quite happy with the trout chow that is their staple. Even one of the 2 bass is finally sampling it, but only the sinking kind. Neither will eat the floating trout chow, I guess the movement of sinking is barely enough to trigger him to bite.
: I wish this board had more posts on it. I have been looking for something like this, but it doesn't seem to get much traffic. If some of you are reading and not posting, how about telling us about your tanks?
: BTW - I am from Missouri and don't need a lecture about whether or not I am allowed to have these fish. I have never had one die in my care, and I release them every spring (when they ARE of legal size) and get a new batch of babies for the coming year.
: cindy
