Breeding Fish As A Hobby

Hi there,

Have an empty garden and intends to have an in-ground pond [ 8 x 10 ft ].
Am new to fish keeping, can any expert advice on depth of pond, filtration and type of fish to breed, please?

Many thanks and best regards

Do you only have one pond? Any other facility to keep the babies? Do you have any experience with breeding at all? How much time do you have to take care of the fish? All these questions will help me to advise you on a nice species for your hobby.

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Hi RBT
Many thanks for your prompt response.
8 x 10 ft is the space available for intented construction of one pond.
I probably can segment this into various ponds with single filtration system, should I?
Only had experience with guppies and sword tail breeding [ more of community breeding where I house them a dug out pond ]
Am a 9 to 5 office worker, will be free on weekends.

Hope these help.

Many thanks again.

Brgds

Your answer does clear up a few things. First of all as a 9-5 person, it will be difficult to attempt to breed more complicated fish such as GF, for they do take a lot of attention and time which will be difficult for you. (Just the breeding alone you will have to be up at around 4 or 5 am. Furthermore, your set up is not too conducive to high maintainance fish (fish that you will have to separate from the parents once the eggs are laid). A big pond is a good thing since it makes the lives of fish better so I do not recommend that you make smaller ponds instead.

If you are tired of guppies and sword fish as such, I suggest that you try to breed species of fish that do raise their own young on their own, such as some species of cicchlids (rams for instance), Angel fish or even Discus, but I would suggest that you try the species that are not too aggressive for they will tend to eat all the offspring if they are hungry. If you are planning to breed seriousely, you should not have too many adult fish in the pond since the non parents will tend to eat the eggs and offsprings.

It will be nice if you could have other set up as well such as aquarium tanks (no filtration unit on the side, just a plain square tank) for the actual breeding purposes. Then you can put the parents fish in for natural breeding, and can remove them once the offspring are ready. You will need to learn how to prepare artemia for feeding of small friar as well. This is not difficult and there are many places where you can learn how to do it from. If you cannot find anything, get back to me and I will try to write something to you about it.

Breeding, more than anything is time consuming and experience is every thing. You should go ahead and read up on some info of the fish you want to breed, and prepare your habitat accordingly. Then go ahead and start. You will sure to stumble and fall at the beginning but as I said before experince is every thing. The more mistakes you make, the more you will learn. The learning curve at the offset will be rather steep but it should level off as time passes. More important than the actual breeding is the taking care of the babies once you have them. You will have to make sure that you will have enough space and resources to deal with them in the long run. You could start to have more fish than you bargain for.

I do understand that my suggestions are rather vague (food for thought mainly), for I do not know exactly what you will decide on, if it is a species that I am familiar with, I will be more than happy to help further on along the road. Let me know how it turns out aight.

__________________
Loyalty above all else, except honor.

Sawadee krap.

Many thanks for your input.
GF certainly interest me.
1.Have to read up more on GF breeding but is the waking up at 4-5 am a daily affair all year round?
2.I'll be renovating my place and would like to include pond construction.
What's the acceptable depth for most fishes [ especially when nil specific species is decided yet ]?
3. What species is low maintenance and could reap some money by selling their babies, please?
4. Have idea of keeping small arrowanas and selling them when they grow bigger, is this advisable, please?

Very best regards.