The AquaPals Face Some Struggles

After having our fish for a while now, we are facing several difficulties that we could not have foreseen. First, we have been having trouble keeping our fish in the fish tank. Since our fingerlings are so tiny, some of them have managed to escape into the clarifier tank. The filter on the bottom of the fish tank has several holes just large enough for them to swim out of. Unfortunately, the only way for us to fix this problem would be to take all of the water out, which we REALLY would like to avoid. So, we tried to put filter bags over the holes to block off their exit. That idea failed because the filter bags were preventing the flow of waste into the clarifier. We contemplated removing the smallest fish and adding them back into the system once they would be big enough to no longer fit through the holes. In the end, we decided to just let it be. This would lead to one fatality. Through this we learned how important it is to pay attention to detail. In construction, if we had noticed that fish might be able to escape we could have avoided this entire ordeal. When we do our next round of fish, we will be sure to solve the issue to avoid any further fatalities with our Pals. Another issue that we have faced has been a serious buildup of solid waste. Our clarifier and mineralization tanks have been accumulating tons of waste on the bottom. Our research is centered upon making aquaponics sustainable and worthwhile for the Hudson Valley. So, if we do water changes every day we are seriously damaging our sustainability. Therefore, we decided to experiment with filtration. We used bio-bags to filter the solid material out of the water and this was a major success! We were able to filter out the water and then add it back into the system without massive quantities of waste floating around in it. One last issue that we have confronted has been how to accurately measure the growth rate of our lettuce. While our research is primarily centered on the fish, we want to prove that our aquaponically grown Bibb lettuce grows tremendously faster than traditionally grown lettuce. Length wouldn't work; surface area wouldn't work; mass would work, but we had waited too long to find that out. So, when we start our next round of crops we will definitely use mass to quantify the growth rate of our lettuce. All in all, we have learned a lot from our mistakes and hope that we can help future AquaPals in creating their own systems!