HELLO HIVE
It had to take a lot of convincing for me to believe that these fingerlings are actually close to three months old 🥺. Like, how did things get so bad that their growth became so stunted to the point where there's no actual difference between these fish that ought to be grown by now to fingerlings that are just starting their life journey?
The loss is so devastating that the original owner of the fingerlings has given up on them, "but then was it the fault of the fingerlings that their growth became stunted or the fault of the farmer?"
Even if the variety was that bad, I don't 🤔 think things should have gotten this bad. I have this strong affiliation to agriculture, touching so many aspects of it like farming and livestock, but I have never had the chance to fully grasp what fish farming was all about, and it's because you hardly find people going into fish farming in areas where water can be scarce sometimes, and my place has a complicated water problem.
The only time I had close contact with an actual functioning fish farm was when my agric teacher in secondary took the students on an excursion to a farm where a lot was explained by the owners of the farm, ranging from how they stock the fingerlings into the water, how they feed them, the composition of their feed (because the owner of the farm normally produces the feed himself), how their water is changed, and how harvesting is done.
A day of lessons is not enough for one to start fish farming, but then there's actually much more to it than just throwing fingerlings into the water.
Thanks to the little class that day, I was able to spot some things that weren't right at that point. One was the location of the fingerlings; the fingerlings were inside a big bowl that wasn't spacious, so the distance wasn't enough for the fingerlings to freely move, and to complicate things, the whole bowl was kept under a roof where sunlight wasn't getting to the water.
The fingerlings are not just meant to feed on what we give them like poultry birds do, but they also feed on phytoplankton and zooplankton, slightly clear water but not too transparent, and the alkaline level of the water needs to be at a certain level.
There's a lot to say about this, and you would agree with me that a lot went wrong at that point, ranging from the space that was too small for the fingerlings to the water's alkaline level, which the owner had no idea what it was, and the fact that the water was virtually not showing any sign of life, like the presence of any plankton.
I am presently varying things to see if there's a way we could help the fingerlings since they've been like this for far too long, but then a lot of finances will go into this if there's any chance like that at all.