Curse me and my large dreams...

[Diskboy12]

So me being the large thinker I am have thought about this on numerous occassions. Get 6 or so RTC's a 20' round pond...or bigger, and see if I can't get some breeding activity.

Yes, I am crazy.

Who even thinks this is plausable?

 

[matt clark]

So me being the large thinker I am have thought about this on numerous occassions. Get 6 or so RTC's a 20' round pond...or bigger, and see if I can't get some breeding activity.

Yes, I am crazy.

Who even thinks this is plausable?

i dont know anything about breeding catfish. but like all things they will have to pair up. then what you going to do with the other 4 rtc. then if they did breed you would have to find good homes for the young and we all know how hard that is. sometimes you have to look past the big idea and look at the bigger picture. good luck bud.

 

[Superlaz]

I think that if you're going to dedicate as much time, space, food, and money as a breeding project such as this would require, I'd focus on a species that may produce some $ back to atleast break even.

To my knowledge, RTC are being hormone induced to breed. Which is how we have all these RTC hybrids as their roe and milt are extracted and manually mixed.

If you want to focus on cats I can only thing of focusing on Tigrinus. I dont think any of these are financially promising unless you corner the market and make this a large project.

 

[Diskboy12]

So your saying why go RTC which you can't get two pennies to rub together for the fry, go for rarer fish, like goonch, planiceps, ect?

 

[Diskboy12]

Actually, I like the goonch idea. No need to heat the water....way cheaper on electric.

 

[Superlaz]

What you'd lose on water heating, you'd make up for in high oxygen level maintenance.

Catfish in general are a niche fish family and you wont find as much interest as you think. I understand the desire to breed these guys, but its costly and you need to take that into account.

With the exception of high end Rays, there arent many fish that you'll be able to breed and get a nice return on investment, while almost guaranteeing constant demand.

 

[Diskboy12]

Ah, gotcha. So what your saying is if I want to actually make money breed something like Discus, rays, FH's, ect.

I guess I will just stick to my plan with my catfish pond, and just admire them...for now.

 

[Diskboy12]

Do you think some species of Peacock Bass would make a good investment for breeding? Like Kelberi, Brokopondo, Azul, ect.?

 

[knifegill]

It's sad, yet true that catfish have fewer fans than less-awesome families of fish. There's no other group of fish with more dark, spiky, gigantic, long-lived gluttons than the catfish. And aside from that, there are plenty of very beautiful species as well! Yet the fishkeeping world is just too focused on teeny sparkly fish like tetras to notice.

As for PBass, I think that ship sailed last year. Wait to see what's next. I don't think anybody's buying Pbass anymore. My LFS can't move them.

 

[amazonfishman]

Only extremely rare pbass would bring good profits. I'd say at the moment that pinima since they haven't been available in a few years would be pretty good and azul's always sell but the market would saturate with them pretty quickly if you got to breeding them regularly.

Like Laz said, it's all hormone induced breeding on the large pimeloids and even in most of those cases it's housing breeder size fish in outdoor ponds in tropical climates that are a lot bigger than 20'. I know they breed TSN this way in many countries in SA as a food source and hybrids initially developed for this same reason.

I'd like to try breeding Planiceps & Tigrinus down the line but that wouldn't be for profit really it would be more for personal reasons and to ease the burden on the wild caught fish to help out with their populations.