Tilapia on our Doorstep...

Last night, at 6:01pm, AquaPal Emme received a package on her porch. Not thinking anything of it, since the tilapia that she ordered were coming the next day, she walked over, taking her time, to get the mail. She expected to see an abundance of random colleges begging her to apply, but instead found a small package labeled: LIVE FISH. Yeah. I love USPS. 30 tilapia were left on my porch and I frantically called all of the AquaPals to figure out how we are going to do this and who can meet me at school. 4 out of the 6 Pals could make it last minute and it was a great experience for the team! We submitted our research to the Lexus Eco Challenge on Monday and now we start our next round of research! We opened the box at school to find that all thirty of the fish survived the journey. We began acclimating them right away. Our pH, temperature, ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels matched their water nearly perfectly and we were able to put them into the system fairly quickly. We decided that it would be wise to get an initial mass reading for the fingerlings as a basis of comparison, but this proved to be difficult in that they weighed so little that there may have been a lot of error in our measurements. On average, we approximate their weight to be .5 gram. They are TINY! And we are so excited to grow them for harvest in our tank. We stayed at Arlington until 10pm, taking care of our new friends. Stay tuned for more AquaLapia updates with the Pals!