Crappie in an Aquarium ???

[Lum]

Getting ready to set up a 55 gal. Aquarium to put a few Crappie in, anybody have any or had any in theirs?? Was wandering what to feed them with best results / any advice as to water temps, etc. Thanks guys.

[crappieseeker]

I know a restaurant that has crappie in an aquarium and they feed them minnows

[Moose1am]

Well I can help you here. With a big aquarium like that you should do fine. Make sure that you treat the water with the right chemicals. I use Buffer 7.0 which works great. It removes heavy metals, modifies the water's pH and also eliminates Chlorine and it's compounds that can kill fish.

I use an Aqua-Tech Power Head 170 gallons per minute power Aerator head which attachs to the top of the plastic tube of the an undergravel filter system. I have an Aua-Tech Power Filter System also. They come in 1-15, 10-20, 20-40 and 30-60 sizes. You will need the 30-60 size for the 55 gallon aquarium. These Power-Tech water filter system that uses charcoal filters encased in a rectangular plastic case and you can pick up filters at Wal-mart.

I change the filters each week or two or whenever they get full of gunk. You can tell when they need changing as they get plugged up and the water behind them will back up and overflow though the intake area. The water is moved though the system with a spinning paddle attached to a water pump thing. Once in a while you will have to take the spindle thing out of the pump and clean it and then oil the metal shaft with a drop of light weight oil. This keeps the paddles spinning easier and helps keep the water flowing smoothly. I put the Aqua-Tech undergravel filter system on the bottom of the aquarium and then put gravel over the top. I have about 2" to 3" of gravel covering the entire bottom of the aquarium. It takes some time to get good bacteria growing in the gravel bed. Those bacteria are necessary to get ride of ammonia that comes from the fish waste. I also use an gravel cleaner system and have a 5 to 6 gallon plastic bucket to hold the water that I siphone off from the tank. I change the water in the aquarium by siphoning the water though the gravel filter device which also picks up the crappie poop. You will have lots of that and will need to clean that up with the siphone filter device. I dump the waste water in the toilet which is near the room where I keep my crappie aquarium. A good underwater heater may be necessary in the winter time if the room gets cold. I maintain water temp of around 76 to 78 deg F. You could keep the water cooler but you will not want the water temp fluctuating wildly. A gradual change in water temp is better than a sudden change. The Crappie will do ok in colder water but you would not want the temp going from 78 down to 50 in one day. Therefore the heater helps stabilize the water temp. I only have a small 20 gallon aquarium so it's more susceptable to water temp changes than your larger 55 gallon aquarium. Latent heat of water an all. I use a 100 watt electric underwater heater but you may need a larger on for your larger aquarium. Ask the guys at the pet store how large of a heater you will need for 55 gallons. In fact ask them about the size of the Aqua-Tech Power Filters and Power Heads for your aquarium. You won't have to use Aqua-Tech as others may work just as well. I do know that the Aqua-Tech have kept my crappie alive and well for over a year now. Aqua-Tech is a REGENT company device. I use the AquaLab I test strips from Mardel Laboratories, Inc. They will let you test your water for pH, Buffering Capacity and Total Hardness. I also use the AquaLab III test Strips which let me test the water for Nitrite and Ammonia Warnings. The test strip kits come with a Water Quality Booklet for Freshwater Aquariums that I highly recommend that you sit down and read a few times. It's the most important thing to know about when raising fish. You have to have good water to have healthy fish. I have a couple of 6 gallon water containers that I use for camping and they have flexible pour spouts on them. I add the buffer ph 7.0 power to the container and then fill the container up with water keeping the water temp the same as that in the aquarium. ie adjust the faucet to get the water temp to about room temp. 75 deg plus or minus 5 deg F. if you have to use colder water that would be better. Cold water holds more oxygen than hot water. I fill the 6 gallon plastic water container up and then let it sit by the aquarium in the same room as the fish. That way it will be a room temp. Since I set the thermostat to about 74 deg in the house the water stays at or around 74 deg F and it's ready to go into the aquarium when I need it. Since my tank is only 20 gallons I only need to refill about 1/2 to 1/3 of the water with each water change so the 6 gallon size container works for me. You may need either more containers or a larger one. Don't dump water straight into the aquarium out of a faucet or water hose. You must first remove the chlorine in the water and get the water to the right temp. Now if you are using well water that is not chlorinated and it's not too hot you could use that safely. But then again you MUST NOT change the aquarium's water quality too much too fast or the fish may die. Check the water's pH before adding it to the aquarium. Don't change the aquariums water's pH by more than 0.2 pH units at a time. Fish can't handle a sudden change of the water's pH. The pH 7.0 buffer comes in a plastic bottle and it has a plastic measuring spoon included. One scoop should treat 10 gallons of water and adjust the water's pH to 7.0 and get the buffering capacity of the water just right. Unless your water is very hard this power stuff should work fine.

Two other chemicals that I found to work are as follows:
Tetra Aqua AquaSafe and Tetra Aqua EasyBalance. I get them in teh 500 ml size plastic containers. The first one is used to adjust the water quality of fresh water that is going to be added to the aquarium. I use it like the ph 7.0 Buffer Up stuff. They both work to remove chlorine and heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium. The chemicals in the soln chelate (Chemically tie up) the heavy metals so that they won't be in a form that can harm the fish. They also neutrlize any chlorine or chloramine compounds in the new water.

EasyBalance is used directly in the aquarium and treats the water and maintains the water quality after the fish have been in the aquarium for a while. It's suppose to allow you to go without changing the water in the aquarium for 6 months. Now I still change the water in my 20 gallon aquarium as I found that this stuff (EasyBalance) drops the pH in my aquarium and I don't like to do that. I have a pH meter that I use and also use the test strips. When the pH of my water gets down I will drain the water out with the gravel filter siphone device and add new water and then treat it to bring the pH of the water back to around 7.0 Fish can survive water pH of 5.0 to 8.5 if the water's pH changes slowly over time. But they won't last very long with a water pH of under 5.0 and over 9.0 Those are not exact figures but guide lines. Try to keep the water clean and at the right temp and as close a pH of 7.0 as you can and the fish will do well.

As far as food. Minnows Minnows and more minnows. You might want to set up a smaller aquarium to keep a good supply of minnows. Remove any dead minnows and feed the live ones to the crappie a few at a time. The crappie can go for three or four days without eating and by that time they will be super hungry. I use shiner minnows or chub minnows. They even like the Rosy Red minnows that Jerry Blake gave to us at the TeeZur Crappie Fishing Tournament. Lots of guys were using some of Jerry's Rosy Reds. He grows them back down in Arkansas. You might ask him about how to farm the rosy red minnows.

Hope this helps give you some ideas.

It's a lot more work than you might think to keep the crappie alive. But I love to watch them in the aquarium. I enjoy them much more than the tropical fish that I use to have. I just wish I had a much larger aquarium.

Oh and at times I have to pull the crappie out of the aquarium and put them in my 48 Quart ice chest cooler. I use a Rule Live well pump and set it up to aerate the water in the cooler. I use to put one of the Aqua-Tech power head filters in the cooler and or an air pump with a hose and diffusion stone to keep oxygen in the water. I keep the crappie in this cooler and then take the water out of their aquarium and dump the gravel out and wash the gravel outside on my driveway. I do this to get all the crappie poop out of the gravel. Then I clean the glass aquarium and all the filters and power heads. My water supply is pretty hard and has a lot of calcium an magnesium in the water. So I have to use CLR (HYDROCHLORIC ACID) sometimes to get ride of the calcium deposits on the aquarium. I rinse the CLR off really good. Three times to make sure that it's all washed off. It's a hard mineral acid and can kill the fish if you get that stuff in the water with the fish. But a good hose washing outside will get ride of the acid and get the aquarium ready for the fish. I only clean the 20 gallon aquarium about once every month or so. It's not a pleasant job. Not sure how I would do this with a 55 gallon aquarium though. But the good thing about a larger aquarium is that you would not have to perform this task as often as I do with my smalller 20 gallon aquarium.

Now are you still ready to keep some live crappie in that aquarium? If so you are ready with the right information.

Ed the crappie.com founder also likes to fool around with aquarium fish so he might add some more to this thread.

Getting ready to set up a 55 gal. Aquarium to put a few Crappie in, anybody have any or had any in theirs?? Was wandering what to feed them with best results / any advice as to water temps, etc. Thanks guys.

[fatboy]

Good lord! One of those novels again.

[ncnat]

Fatboy, Moose must have figured out to get around the 1000 word limit per post. LOL

[Moose1am]

Actually when I pressed the "enter" button after typing that post I was worried that I would have to copy and paste it into two posts again. LOL

Fatboy, Moose must have figured out to get around the 1000 word limit per post. LOL

[duane]

Actually when I pressed the "enter" button after typing that post I was worried that I would have to copy and paste it into two posts again. LOL

word count was 1844

used word counter in MS Word

[whizkids]

After reading that post from Moose, I am absolutley sure that keeping crappie in an aquarium would require more time away from the lake than my schedule will allow.

good luck

[hawkman]

Warning! Warning! Information Overload1

[fishingpox]

LOL you guys kill me. I just wished I had his Moose's vocabulary.