Thailand Fish Farms
The following text and photographs were sent to me by David, who posts in rec.aquaria.freshwater.misc. Take it away David:
The first 6 photos are of the tropical fish section of the Chatuchak market in downtown Bangkok. What you see here is probably about five percent, certainly less than ten percent, of the entire live fish market. Each of the plastic bags contains, depending upon size and species, a dozen to perhaps a hundred fish. And each bag sells for the equivalent of a few U.S. dollars. The number of species and varieties available for sale in the Chatuchak market, to the untrained eye, (mine), is virtually uncountable ... infinite. I kept telling my wife, "how could we ever, EVER, make a decision here??!!"
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To provide a "single-point" price example, bettas are sold in individual small plastic bags containing less than a cup of water. But they are also sold wholesale as a large bag full of little bags. If purchased like this, at wholesale, each betta runs about 3 Thai baht, which is the equivalent of 7-1/2 U.S. cents.
The remainder of the photos were taken at a tropical fish farm in Nakon Pathom, about 50 kilometers west of Bangkok. The first of these are at one of the farm's betta culture sites. (BTW they call them "battle fish" in Thailand). The first photo shows a row of fry culture tanks, underneath the drip line of the thatch roof of the shelter building. Each of these tanks contains a different size/age of fish, my understanding of which is that they are all within a day or so of the same age. Note the woven palm fronds on the ground to the right, which are used to shade the tanks from the afternoon sun.
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The next shot is down into a representative tank. The thin lines are rice straws. I'm not sure why they are there, but I suspect that they are to permit insects to land, to provide an additional natural food source. The vertical PVC is a standpipe, which can be pulled to drain the tank for cleaning.
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The fry will remain in this tank until they grow large enough that they begin to become aggressive toward each other. At that time they are netted manually and placed separately into individual bottles, as are shown in the next photo. In these bottles they will grow until they are of marketable size. The fish are fed live food daily, to mature them as quickly as possible.
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You can see the small white funnel for inserting the fish into the bottles, and the red tub of fingerlings about to be installed into their new accommodations. The shape of the bottles conveniently prevents the fish from jumping out, and also each bottle has a horizontal slit sawed into the side, at about two-thirds of the height, to control the water's depth and consequently to further inhibit any successful attempts at jumping out of the bottle's mouth. And how do they do water changes? They spray water with a hose, and the filled bottles then drain back down to the slit level. I asked my wife to pull a bottle at random, for a closer view.
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The next picture is the first ohmigod view! Bottled bettas for nearly as far as the eye can see. And this is only one side of the shelter building, (the other side looks the same, as can be seen in the next picture), and there are several such buildings. The owner told us that he ships around 100,000 bettas a week - and sometimes cannot meet the demand and has to buy from other local breeders.
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The next several pictures show the "harvesting" process. Note that the bottles are so densely packed that the workers can easily walk on them. I watched several workers walk down the entire length just as casually as one would walk down a sidewalk in the city. Anyway, the young lady grabs two or three bottles at a time, and dumps the surely confused inhabitants into a drainage tray. When the number of fish reaches about a quart's measure, they take it to the "sorting station". This consists of a tub of water covered with a silk cheese cloth that just barely touches the water. The purpose of this is to gently immobilize the fish, while providing a slippery enough surface so that they won't be injured. They then use a soup spoon, the same one that you eat with in a cheap Chinese restaurant, to count and sort the fish into different containers. (Later one of the workers told us that they were so surprised and taken aback by our visit that they forgot to count the fish!) I asked the workers if it wouldn't harm the fish to keep them out of the water like this for so long? She said, "nah..., they could stay out of water like this for two days without harm"! I was so amazed at that answer that I didn't push it any farther - I still don't know whether she meant in the wet silk screen or in the drainage tray; but if the latter, the ambient humidity was admittedly pretty high, and maybe that would be sufficient. Either way, these are clearly some pretty tough fish!
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The final four photos show the owner, along with my wife, at another of his farm sites a few kilometers away. The lighting wasn't very good, but you can see that these are not bettas. He said that the water in these culture tanks is changed three times per day. They pull the standpipe, cover the drain with a kitchen strainer, flush half the water, and then refill from the well water pipes. Pretty basic, but it obviously works just fine. Oh, and the flushed water goes into his rice paddies behind his fish farm. Clever and green!
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Thanks David!
NetMax
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