*******CHAPTER SEVEN******* BACK TO FLORIDA AND ACTUALLY PRODUCING TILAPIA

*******CHAPTER SEVEN******* BACK TO FLORIDA AND ACTUALLY PRODUCING TILAPIA

The trip to Forteleza was a truely a success since we got the species of tilapia we had come for.  A new world of the Brazilians were wishing us all the luck because as they saw it, if we were able to prove the tilapia business to be a success it would help them as well.  They also provide us with several boxes of T. nilotica which came from the species they were breeding with the t. hornorum and were getting all male hybrids from.

We boarded the Airline in Forteleza and had a scheduled stop in Belgium, which was the point of Debarkation for us and what we did not know was where everything was looked at to make sure we were doing things properly.   When we got to Miami we came into the customs area with all of our bags and boxes at around 3:00 am just before the customs agents were due to change shifts. The customs agent was presented with all of the documents concerning Christy most of which were in Portuguese and was apparently overwhelmed and finally decided to just pass us through fish, baby and all.

So, now we were back in Florida with the right species of tilapia, a permit in out hands, a suitable facility and a lot of will to succeed. We last heard from __ about the macaws when she called and told us she would require more money in order to get the birds packed and shipped out of Manous, but due to the extra financial drain and the fact that we could not get anyone in Florida to back us up with additional funds we had to pass up on the birds. We later found out that just one of the Hyacinth macaws could in a proper sales situation bring more than enough money to recover all of our cost.

We arrived back in Palmetto and moved into a mobile home we had arranged to rent and have delivered to our “new farm” prior to going to Brazil.

Jan and I were of course well occupied with being new parents and Christy was a real handful. She had a touch of colic when we got home with her and she would stand on

my lap and lift her whole body straight up and scream at me and I would rock her until she quieted down and fell to sleep. After a few days at home, we got lots of advice and found that Christy was lactose intolerant and so switched her to a soy formulae and the colic gradually went away and holding her and rocking her became a thing of pleasure where she just enjoyed the ride and cooed whenever I took the time to rock her.

Right from the beginning Christie was very active and assertive, she could not be put down on a bed, even when surrounded by pillows, we found out to our surprise, when one of us placed her on the bed and placed pillows carefully on all sides of her. She was asleep at the time and so we went into another room so we would not wake her. Then a few minutes later Jan’s voice comes from the bedroom… ”Mike, where did you put Christie?” I hurried into the bedroom and said, “what do you mean, where’s Christie? I got on my hands and knees and looked under the bed which was a queen size and was shoved all the way up to the wall, on one side, but Christie was not in sight on the floor, so I said “she is not on the floor,” and Jan, who was literally flying around the room looking in the dresser drawers as if a 3 week old baby could have climbed into a drawer, and about that time we can hear a muffled cry coming from somewhere in the room.

So Jan ran over to the side of the bed and began pulling the bed out from the wall so she could look under the bed again, suddenly there was a cluck and a shriek and Jan ran around the end of bed and Picked up Christie from the floor where she had just landed, then let out a shriek as she lifted her up, at the fact that there was blood streaming down her little face. She rushed from the room with her and got some clean towels to wipe her off and then she could see that the injury was a very slight cut on her cheek, which quickly stopped bleeding as Jan held the cloth against her cheek.

What has obviously happened is that in the short time we were both out of the room, Christie had scooted from about a foot  from the edge of the bed that was on the open room side clear across to the opposite corner of the bed and had fallen off the bed where she could not be seen between the bed and the wall and when Jan had pulled out the bed she had fallen from where she was to the floor.

So we both received a lesson in the mobility of a 3-week-old baby and we never ever left her again unwatched.

When we got to the farm we  of course carefully placed each box of tilapia in an appropriate tank in the large building .

To breed new breeders for the next generation of t. horomorum and I also placed a male with 5 femalet. horomorum So we would soon have a good supply of these pure t. horomorum.

Then as each female produced hybrid young I milked the babies from them and put them in a new tank in another building to  grow.  Within 4 or 5 weeks I had increased the number of pure line t. hornorum to several thousand counting the babies.

Now it was time to begin getting the other species together to produce the all male hybrids. So I called Wassie Fish’s farm. I went to Wassie’s farm second time to get more of

the t. mossambica and bring them back to my farm to breed. He was very sympathetic and again gave me about 25 t. mossambica, male and female.

I took them back to Piney Point and set up an area to use for breeding the T. mossambica and began to reproduce them too. I was able to separate out about ten females from the t. mossambica and put them in a tank and found several t. hornorum males to put with them. At the same time I put 7 or 8 female t. nilotica in another tank and also put several t. hornorum males with them to breed. About six or seven weeks later I had several thousand of each male hybrid and I had to find tanks for them too.

While it was possible with the large number of tanks I had to allocate a few tanks here for one cross, another few tanks there for another cross and then 10 to twenty tanks each for the pure lines which had to be kept in separate parts of the buildings to avoid the fatal flaw of the hybrid producer of mixing up the brood fish.

With all of these tanks allocated to producing various hybrids or pure lines there comes a point when one runs out of empty clean tanks where they are needed and that is what

happened to me when I made perhaps what is the most important discovery I ever made with tilapia.

I had just milked out of several mothers mouths and had about 500 all male hybrids in a bucket and I needed a place to put them and so I took them to a tank where I had placed around 300 all male hybrid fry about a week or ten days before.  So, I had the new fry which were just over a quarter of an inch, in a bucket and I began pouring them with the water end of the tank next to the walkway .

As I poured, I noticed that the older fry which were about an inch in legenth which had already been in the tank for about 8 or 10 days and were about an inch and a quarter long had come up to where the water with the fry was cascading into the tank and were eating the new hybrid fry as fast as they hit the water from the bucket.

In a flash ******** it hit me! The older fry were eating all of the smaller fry like candy so the tilapia hy-

brids were essentially *****cannibalistic *****when it came to eating small fry just out of the

mother’s mouth.

This seemingly simple recognition explained many many things about tilapia hybrids and led to much more efficient breeding systems than anything I had in

progress before that time.

Related Posts

1. ********CHAPTER EIGHT******** TILAPIA RESEARCH BEGINS
2. *****CHAPTER FIVE***** ARRIVAL IN FORTELEZA BRASIL
3. (Half of Chapter 1) Creating Cherry Snapper -A Story About How I Became Interested In Tilapia and What Led To Creating Cherry Snapper
4. Advantages of Hybrid Pennyfish (Tilapia) Culture
5. TILAPIA SPECIES “?”

About the author

MIKE SIPE

I am 70 as of August 4th 2010.  I have spent over 41 years Breeding tilapia, improving tilapia gene lines creating Red tilapia, and improving the body form of "pennyfish" from 24% in 1963 to 50% in 2009. I have pioneered and installed high oxygen intensive aquaculture production  systems.   We (TILAPIA AQUACULTURE INTERNATIONAL) built the first u-tube used to control oxygen and co2 levels in aquaculture.   We can dissolve up to  800 parts per million parts of water and thereby control oxygen levels in growing situations. ( THIS IS WHAT MAKES OUR INTENSIVE CULTURE SYSTEM WORK SO WELL) We have designed hatchery systems to produce thousand of pennyfish fingerlings a day using breeder cages.   We have helped to establish the production of over two billion pounds per year of our tilapia in over 50 locations in North America, Mexico, South America, Central America, Kenya Africa, and Saudi Aribea in the Middle east.  Our goal is to help people with the production of tilapia necessary to *feed everyone* in the world a well balanced nutritious* diet, and to restore the forest of the world. If you wish to talk with me my phone number is 877 217 7006. Please feel free to call me during normal Eastern daylight times. At this particular time I believe that I have more hands on experience in building , designing and running u-tubes to lower the cost and risk for growing all kinds of Aquaculture by 10% - 20% and the cost of dissolving oxygen in an intensive system by 50- 85%. The safety issue is by far the most important issue because having complete control over the oxygen level in a tank helps to assure he safety of the crop and the cost. Another area where I have extensive experience is on what is required to create new characteristics in a gene line. We can take a tilapia that is black and turn it to a brilliant red or take a gene line and select for various body form changes or various internal genetics needed needed to manufacture certain expensive biochemical products..such as Heparin which is an important molecule in haemoglobin that plays a role in clotting blood. A good breeding and selection system could virtually increase the production of almost any biological chemical system in the tilapia.

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