I was checking out the hops growing over the aquaponics pond and noticed fry swimming around! A few months ago all the sunfish where removed, supposedly, from the pond to make room for catfish fingerlings ordered from a fish farm. Apparently four of the sunfish hid in the shadows well enough to escape the net. There have never been problems with any sort of sickness in the pond, but all 45 catfish fingerlings died within three weeks of arrival due to some mysterious disease. The fish may have arrived sick and stressed. During this time one of the four sunfish caught the disease and died as well. Since then the three sunfish have been lurking about in the shadows. They get fed pest bugs from the garden, soldier fly maggots and a small bit of floating fish food that they never seem to eat.

Originally when the sunfish were removed for the catfish, the sunfish had been in the pond for two years. It seemed they were growing too slow and ultimately would never get very large at all. Upon netting the fish out, twenty-five total, they were a bit larger than expected. When first starting the idea was to stock with bluegill, a large species of sunfish. But what actually ended up in the pond was a mixed bag of sunfish. I honestly have no idea what species of sunfish are in the pond right now. Guessing it would be either green sunfish or some hybrid thereof. Now that there seems to be a breeding pair of sunfish, which isn’t something you can do with catfish in a pond this small, I’m curious as to how these fry will do.

Other things to consider about these sunfish is that they’re acclimated to our local conditions. This means they don’t need to have their water heated or cooled to stay alive. They’ve already survived water temperatures down to 33 degrees in the winter and close to 100 during the heat of summer. They’re apparently fairly resistant to the disease that killed all the catfish fingerlings and the fourth sunfish. While perhaps a bit small, the sunfish we’ve eaten have been tasty.

The next step with the aquaponics was to order catfish and try again but maybe that will be put on hold to see how these fry fair. Catfish fingerlings would eat these tiny fish pretty quick. Unfortunately the grow beds will suffer as there won’t be much nitrogen coming in from such a small number of fish.