How much does it cost to grow big fish?

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snailaquarium

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I read this interesting article which is basically someone having a go at people who buy fish that they call "tank busters" ie they get too big for the tank the owner has bought and then they have issues getting rid of the fish, which to my surprise is getting harder to do, anyway i was curious how much does it cost to keep something like a red tail cat fish and grow it from baby to adulthood,and how long do they live for??
 
I'm curious why can't they just put the fish into a suitable river??
 
Female Redtail catfish can reach 5 feet in length, males are a bit smaller, and they can live for 30+ years. With fish you need a tank that is at least twice as wide as the fish and at least 4 times their length. So a redtail catfish from South America needs a tank that is at least 10 feet wide x at least 20 feet long, (basically a heated pond).

If you have large active fish, they need even more room to move. Tarpon for example grow to 6 feet long, maybe more, and they are active fish so they need a pond that is several hundred feet long so they can actually swim and jump.

As far as how much it costs to keep one, it depends on what you feed it and how often you feed it. Some years ago we got in some baby redtail catfish that were about 1 inch long. Most were sold but we put 2 into our tanks. The tanks were 4ft long x 2ft wide x 2ft high. The fish were well fed every day with a variety of fish foods and weren't fussy about eating anything. Within 6 months, one fish was about 18 inches long and the other was 2 feet long and both were eating 10-20 whitebait each day. Whitebait are about 4 inches long and we use to buy them in bulk from the bait shop. They ate heaps of them and they were young fish that were less than half grown. The tanks were given huge water changes twice a week and we couldn't keep any other fish in the tank because they got eaten.

If you have the space for a huge tank, and you have cheap water, then it's not such an issue. But if you rent, or have water restrictions, or are limited to space, you don't want tank busters.
 
Wow! That is insane! 5 feet long?!? How big of a tank would you need? :p
 
New I'm curious why can't they just put the fish into a suitable river??
So you want to buy juveniles of large species of fish and grow them up, and when they are too big to care for, release them into the local river?

Introducing new species and or foreign species into an ecosystem can destroy that ecosystem. The introduced animal/ fish can eat all the native fishes and destroy the fishing industry (eg: redtail catfish, arowana, big predatory cichlids). They can cause an imbalance in the system and this can allow some species to thrive and other species to struggle. The native species usually suffer and become extinct.

They can dig up the substrate and destroy plants and cause massive erosion of river banks (eg: carp, plecostomus). This can lead to flooding in areas that have never been flooded, or drought in areas that use to have lots of water.

They can attack people (piranha, snakeheads, pike). People have released predatory fishes into rivers and those fish have survived and bred. When local residents go swimming at their creek, they get attacked by the introduced species.

They can introduce new diseases into that ecosystem that can wipe out the endemic species. In the south-west of Western Australia is the Goodga River. It was home to Galaxias truttaceus and a couple of other species of fish and freshwater crayfish. This river is miles from anywhere and the fish have never been exposed to common fish diseases. Over the last 20 years, people have released introduced species (goldfish, rosy barbs, some cichlids, etc) into this river and the native fishes are all dying from the new diseases they are being exposed to. The native fish could become extinct in the next 10 years, because of introduced species bringing in new diseases.

-------------------
If we look at other unwanted introductions, there are numerous species that have been introduced into new areas and they have done considerable damage to the environment. Cane Toads were brought into Australia about 60 years ago. They were meant to control cane beetles. It turns out they don't like cane beetles but do like native frogs and other native organisms. None of the native animals have ever been exposed to Cane Toads so they just think it is a big frog and try to eat it. The Cane Toad secretes a poison, which kills the native animal. Australia has lost millions of native animals just to Cane Toads. We even lose domestic pets who grab the toads and die from the poison.

Cats are another introduced species. In Australia there is an estimated 80 million feral cats living in the bush. There are only 25 million people here. If each cat kills and eats 1 native animal per day, we are losing 80 million native birds and animals every single day of the year. It works out to about 29,200,000,000 animals and birds killed every year just in Australia. I don't normally deal with numbers that have that many 0s, but I think that number is 29 billion. That's an astonishing amount of animals to lose and explains why so many native animals here are threatened with extinction.

Rabbits were introduced here 200 years ago and have wiped out native plants and caused the deserts to spread by eating all the native vegetation and digging up the soil. They breed prolifically when there is rain and after the food runs out, millions of rabbits starve to death.

In Tasmania (island off the south-east coast of Australia) is a small native bird called a Swift Parrot. About 20 years ago someone introduced sugar gliders to Tasmania. The sugar gliders are going into the parrot nests at night and killing the adults and baby parrots. The parrots are on the endangered species list.

There is an introduced plant here called the African daisy. It has spread through the bushland and is smothering native orchids, many of which are on the endangered species list due to habitat destruction caused by people digging up the bushland. When the orchids disappear, the native bees that rely on them will disappear too. People also spray herbicide on the native plants and kill them.

In Papua New Guinea, Tilapia were introduced into Lake Wanam for the locals to eat. The locals hate Tilapia and won't eat it. The Tilapia have destroyed the native fish populations in the lake and most of the species from Lake Wanam are now either extinct or on the endangered species list.

My big hate is humans. Everywhere people go they destroy everything. The human race has relocated itself around the world and is destroying the environment. Yes I am human, at least the doctor says I am, but people are introducing themselves to new areas and decimating those new areas. Papua New Guinea is being deforested and dug up, and thousands of species are being wiped out. Some of these species are known to science and others are undescribed species. People are destroying plants and animals that could potentially be a cure to cancer, or any other disease, and people just don't care.

Introduced species can directly compete against native species for food, breeding sites, habitat and other resources. They can introduce new diseases into that environment. Many have no natural predators in the new environment and can breed out of control and destroy everything in the area. Introducing new species to an ecosystem should never be done.
 
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Thanks Colin, the guy on Catch Em all Fishing had i think at his mums place a river so they actually took freshwater from the river which goes into their pond so it doesn't need changing, as its always fresh. I live near a lot of water, i wonder if i could find a place to do that!
 
yeah releasing those into the river if they arent native doesn't sound like a good idea, i didn't realise they were bought in.
 
The YouTube, “Catch em’ all”? I have whatched some of his videos.

@Colin_T is right. I have watched many a “River Monsters”, where the red tailed catfish was one of the prime suspects, for a human attack.

Pleco’s, are a very invasive species, all because some idiot decided one day, “oh! This thing got to big for my tank! Let’s just either flush it down the toilet, or dump it in my local stream!”

Now there are thousands, if not millions, in the wild to this day. And people do that all the time. Either, “oh! This thing is to big!” Or “I can’t care for this thing any more, so I’m going to dump it in my river”.

That leads to a lot of problems.

Other animals (aka rats/mice) would not be in the USA, if it had not been for the first sailors, to the USA. They brought them over here from England, and now there are millions.

Same with illness. Native Americans, didn’t have any illness’s, before the English arrived in the new world.

Human Kind has made many mistakes. Please never consider dumping any animal, in a habitat it is not supposed to Be in. :)
 
Hi

Not wanting to sound funny but Is it also a bad idea to buy pond snails and put those in the pond too? As you may have seen my pond algea bloom thread there is also thick algea on the side of the pond. Though I dare not put in the Malaysian snails cuz those breed quite rapidly.

Thanks in advance
 
Aquatic snails can carry larvae from intestinal worms and various flukes that can infect birds, fish and other animals that ingest them. Moving snails into rivers or ponds can transfer the parasites into the river or pond. And if you take snails from ponds and put them in the tank, they can introduce those diseases into your tank.

Don't release anything into a natural water way and be careful about adding snails to your aquarium if they come from a waterway that has birds around it.

If you have a pond with lots of filamentous algae growing on things, snails won't do much to help. The easiest way to remove filamentous algae is to do big water changes and suck out any gunk in the bottom of the pond. If you want to add snails to a pond, use Ramshorn snails. They are the easiest to control and aren't as likely to carry parasites compared to normal Lymnaea pond snails.
 
Oh well we have plenty of rams horn snails :) mum has like two hundred I think her aquarium though these are small, how exactly does one get gunk off the bottom, syphon it up?
 
Use a big hose and try to syphon it out of the pond. If the pond is at the lowest point of the yard, then you get a bilge pump (used on ships to pump out water), and use that to pump out the water and gunk on the bottom.
 
Speaking of Blue Rams Horn Snails, do they lay their eggs in “sacks”?

Here is a quote from this website. > https://www.aquariumcarebasics.com/freshwater-snails/ramshorn-snail/

Ramshorn Snail Reproduction: Egg Clutches
Ramshorn Snail reproduction is one of the challenges that hobbyists face with this pet. Reproduction can be swift and robust. They lay egg clutches on hard surfaces soon after being added to a tank.

The egg clutches are clear, jelly-like globs containing what appear to be about one dozen round areas, each with a little dot. These egg clutches can be most noticeable when they are laid on aquarium glass, but for every visible egg clutch, there are undoubtedly sever others hidden on other hard surfaces. After a couple of days, each little dot appears less clear and more translucent-white in color, and the shape of each baby snail can be seen. Soon thereafter, the little translucent-white snails can be observed wiggling their way out of their egg and moving away from the clutch. One way hobbyist control Ramshorn Snail reproduction is to control feeding. The more Ramshorn Snails eat, the more they reproduce, everything else equal.

Is this information correct? :)

(I will post a picture if you need one.)
 
Ramshorn snails produce a sack of eggs that looks like clear jelly blobs with dark spots in. The dark spots are the eggs.
 
Ok, so I do have eggs!! :)

How long does it take for them to hatch? :)
 

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