By David Steinkraus
dsteinkraus@journaltimes.com | Posted: Sunday, June 28, 2009 12:00 am
MOUNT PLEASANT - Throw a line or a net into Lake Michigan and you're not guaranteed to come up with a lake perch. Their numbers have been mostly down for years, but there is no shortage of this favorite Friday fish fry subject in Steve Wayo's garage - or there won't be once his young fish grow up in about a year.
"I've been looking into raising perch for years," Wayo said. He took a class on it in the 1990s, but the system in use then relied on aquarium technology to keep the water clean, and it was too expensive and involved to maintain. Now he has found his answer, or what he hopes will be his answer.
Everything is contained in one space in his garage, a volume of about 4 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet. He assembled the whole system over the course of a couple of weeks at a cost of $1,500 to $1,600. There's a galvanized tank of the sort used on farms to water livestock, a large wooden frame and above the galvanized tank are two more beds with pea gravel on their bottoms serving as a base in which watercress grows.
It works like this. In the bottom tank are the fish, about 400 to start with at lengths of 2ƒ to 3 inches. The water from this tank is pumped to the upper beds where it is filtered by the water cress and then drains by gravity back to the fish tank where bacteria clinging to the gravel bottom also help the filtration.
"Eventually I'm planning on putting several dozen of these in a warehouse," Wayo said. "I figured if I'm going to fail, I'd rather do it on a small scale."
His experiment has had its problems. Although he started the pumps running about five weeks before he introduced the fish, he said he made the mistake of putting all of them in at once. The system couldn't handle that sudden volume of waste. It broke down into ammonia, and Wayo lost about 30 fish a day for a few days. Then the ammonia broke down further into nitrate. That killed only a few fish per day.
Now he's down to 250 to 300 fish. The system is stable, he said. But he still monitors it using a small test kit sitting on a workbench.
Eventually, if the warehouse idea bears fruit, he hopes to sell his fish to local restaurants. For this summer, he will help students at Walden High School build their own version of the system.