Splitting Fish - Not As Gross As It Sounds

Our little fish are growing up and outgrowing their tanks.

Too many fish in the tank.

The rate fish grow has a lot to do with water temperature but also how stressed they are.  Crowded fish are stressed.  Salmon in warm water are stressed.  The big fish bump the little fish out of the way when scarfing down the food.

There is a lot going on in the little fish world.

On June 6th our little fish outgrew their 6 foot indoor tanks and were moved outside to their 20 and 30 foot outdoor tanks.  They have once again grown so much that each tank of fish now needs to be “split” into two tanks of fish.

This is called the mid-summer split.  It is a lot of hard, physical work.

The crowder is set up in the tank.

One side is moved around the tank, collecting the fish, until the fish are crowded into a small confined space.

The fish are scooped out of the crowder and placed into a large movable tank to be moved to a permanent tank.  Each scoop is weighted before going into the moving tank.

Fish that escape the crowder have to be rounded up.  This is not easy!  They do not want to be caught.

Rounding up the escapees.

The fish are moved to their new home.

They are a little stunned for a while but they will soon spread out and start enjoying their new home.

Salt is added to each tank to protect the scales and skin after being handled.

It takes seven or eight days to get all the fish “split”.  We didn’t get to do this last year so it was nice to learn something new.  My job was to keep track of how many pounds of fish were in each scoop.  Mark was in the tanks doing the hard work.  

This was a fun job.