Profitable fish to breed?

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You can breed stingrays and make a profit. I am speaking from experience here. With a solid breeding group of 1M to 3 or 4F in around a 1000 gallon setup you can make a solid profit. You do not need to feed stingrays any special food from the fish store. Go to your local Asian super market and get some frozen food or fresh seafood to feed them, they love it and it is usually a lot cheaper than the food you get at a lfs.
 
Bamboo and/or vampire shrimp, the large (and small) fan shrimp species. High price, interesting and good temperament for the aquarium. Rare in the industry as they're costly, so once you crack the nut of breeding them you'll run the show.
Don't seem to grow terribly quickly but are berried all the time, it seems. Look up commercial breeding/rearing of Macrobrachium rosenbergii. Fan shrimp should be similar.
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Are you set on fish? You can breed shrimp for a very nice heafty profit. Gold bee shrimp fetch a very high price and imbreeding is perfectly acceptable, I've seen +20 generations imbreeding and theres no problems. Only problem is you need a good genetic pool so spending the extra $$$ in the beginning on a quality batch will ensure quality off spring.
 
What I made a profit on was live rock when I had a reef tank. I would make my own rock, cure it, then stick it in my tank. I'd put the rock up on craigslist after it grew some life on it.

I mainly started doing this to offset the cost of running a reef tank. I really was just trying to break even but I definitely came out ahead selling it for $2-3/lb. Might be able to net a higher price now. I just did a quick search and see some rock going for $5/lb.
 
What I made a profit on was live rock when I had a reef tank. I would make my own rock, cure it, then stick it in my tank. I'd put the rock up on craigslist after it grew some life on it.

I mainly started doing this to offset the cost of running a reef tank. I really was just trying to break even but I definitely came out ahead selling it for $2-3/lb. Might be able to net a higher price now. I just did a quick search and see some rock going for $5/lb.

I was thinking of that too, selling live rock has always sounded like a good idea, especially when LFS sometimes price their live rock way above where it should be.
 
I was thinking of that too, selling live rock has always sounded like a good idea, especially when LFS sometimes price their live rock way above where it should be.

I'd recommend making it the healthiest rock possible. Keep red cyano out of the tank. No fish would probably work best with some cleaner crews. Buy a jar of copepods and pour it in the tank. Coraline algae is what's really going to sell the rock so if you can get some fancy spores that may help as well. if I recall GARFS Grunge has all different kinds of algae colors.

With a tank that healthy you can probably grow coral too. I never really attempted to sell any of my corals but they did grow surprisingly fast when my tank was at optimal health.
 
In order to make a good profit, you need fish that not many people breed, but many people want. These fish will be expensive and sometimes only sold as fry.

L46 prices (the zebra pleco) are only on the rise with the new Belo Monte dam. Most hypancistus plecos will be the same. The blue-eyed panaque is damn near impossible to find either.
 
Fish with high profit
1) arowana's (good luck)
2) stingrays (300 gal tank with 1m 1f motor will have some profit)
3)Discus (easy to breed and they sell for a lot)
4)Angelfish( easy to breed +high numbers)
5)Guppy's( not much profit but enjoyable)
6)Large cichlids(make good $$$)
7) gars (hard to breed but in a pond they will make money)
8) geophagus (ranging from15-30$ each at lfs now)
9) rams (they sell for a good amount)
10) peacock bass (breeding is not too difficult and they sell for a lot)
List was purely opinion based
 
black rays over brown because of value. You get back what you put in.

Agree with TNT, Asian markets for frozen fish and market shrimp. Or quarantine/freeze your own fish if you're a fisherman. Can't beat free.
 
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