For those who missed page 3 of The Australian newspaper yesterday (thursday 22 July) there was an article about the system and the training that we are doing.
The link is http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1225895307518
Also more photos of the system
one thing that would work, and lead to less mess with dealing with a mechanical filter would be to go all natural. a simple series of tanks that forces water over and under a wall with basic fishing nets placed in the chambers would work just fine. yes, there will be a bit of a mess at first, but this awesome little bugger will come along (even if you do not introduce it yourself) called gammarus. these little guys are the equivalent of ant to the aqua-world. they will eat the solid fish waste, further breaking the minerals down, making it easier for the plants to absorb. another plus to this, is it make your systems more natural, making the pH levels more stable. i managed the Friendly Aquaponics farm on Hawaii and never once had to adjust the pH level, mainly because we were just growing lettuce on an artificial natural ecosystem. basically we got nature started, we recirculate the water, and we let the good bugs in, while keeping the bugs out. there is actually a Swedish man in thailand looking into breeding excess amount of the gammarus in his system to use as a protein additive to fish food. (=
Hi Damon,
What you've described is a form of mechanical filtration.....it's a sedimentation tank with a second stage mineralisation tank........one thing that would work, and lead to less mess with dealing with a mechanical filter would be to go all natural. a simple series of tanks that forces water over and under a wall with basic fishing nets placed in the chambers would work just fine.
This is the part that I find intriguing......I can't recall ever seeing these creatures in my systems. I'd love to be able to breed something like that.........yes, there will be a bit of a mess at first, but this awesome little bugger will come along (even if you do not introduce it yourself) called gammarus. these little guys are the equivalent of ant to the aqua-world. they will eat the solid fish waste, further breaking the minerals down, making it easier for the plants to absorb. another plus to this, is it make your systems more natural, making the pH levels more stable.
The flood and drain aquaponics system relies on worms for much of the mineralization of solids.....but, while they reduce the volume of solids by up to 60%, it begs the question what happens to the other 40%. Presumably, Gammarus also leaves a residue behind......what happened to that.
The other important consideration here, is that Friendly systems were very lightly stocked if I recall correctly.
Your thoughts?
Gary
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer
www.microponics.net.au - for candid dialogue on integrated backyard food production.
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when dealing with mechanical, i was meaning mainly anything with moving parts.
our breeding tanks were very lightly stocked, withe a 2-1 female to male ration with a total of around 40 fish in each breeding tank.... but our holding tanks had about 1-1.5 tons of bio mass in fish weight. whether it was our giant tank that held the adult fish ranging from a quarter pound to 5 lbs each... or our series tank where we raised the young in different stages of development... our tank we over flowing with fish....
the effectiveness of the gammarus i would think would depend on the amount of time they could spend in the water... every water environment is going to have a thin biofilm covering every inch of the inside of tank walls and pipes and raft bottoms and fittings... there really isn't much anyone can so about that other than drastically changing the pH of the system enough to keep natural growth from forming...
the main thing to worry about would be keeping the sun light from directly hitting any part of the system for a prolonged period of time... this causes the thin layer of biofilm to quickly bloom into strands of algae. also the gammarus like the shade and would be more effective cleaners if the shade. another good thing about keeping the water shaded is it prevent the sun from burning off the nitrites and nitrates in the water.
there is such a thing called nitrogen toxicity. this is when you get too much of a good thing. the nitrifying bacteria eat the nitrates and produce the highly sought nitrogen that the plants feed off of... up to a certain point this is a good thing, but once you go over board you produce leaves will swell and look like they are exceptionally plump and luscious... this is right before the leave literally crack and bleed out... this is a small, but controllable hazard of too much shading of your system... if you nitrate level spike too high, just remove the shade for a small amount of time to burn off some of the excess, and then when go back to re-shade your systems water leave a few hole for a little bit of sunlight.
The gammarus themselves naturally occur any place that there is water... every continent. the best to use in your system would naturally be the species that is local to your region. they are about twice the size of a mosquito larva, and live synergistically with mosquito fish to help keep your trough areas clean from bugs and waste... also this allows more fish poo into the system since the mosquito fish will seek sources of protein from the bugs landing on the waters surface... but if their numbers do become overwhelming, and they grow large enough, they will begie to eat your plant roots... ( we just went in with 4ft wide square nets and fished out the big one ever 3 weeks or so...)
the first place we saw the gammarus was in the solid settling net tanks... they really took a foot hold in the netting where the fish waste was the greatest, and then the began to flow down stream into the troughs where the made themselves at home in the coir that settled to the bottom of the troughs. they really do tend to live where the water table is at a constant height... when someone above said they saw them in their gravel bed system it surprised me because of how tightly the gravel settles together, but i guess it would be possible.
hope i got everything there... it's getting late and i'm minus one of my contacts.
creating the path of least resistance is what i do.
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