Second selection on August '16 #2 spawning
Selection time again…. And last weekend, we performed second selection on the August ’16 #2 spawning. These fry are now around the 2 inch mark and we whittled the numbers down by around a half.
Amanda and I worked through it together, and that’s helping to make progress more quickly. Frankly – it’s also lot more fun than sitting for hours in the polytunnel on my own! We started at 10am, and completed the selection and started to take pictures at around 3pm. We didn’t keep count… but estimate something like 1.5 to 2k fry kept, and the same selected out to move on.
We reserved one small cage net to put any fry that looked particularly good. And here’s some video, and pictures from that net at the end of the day
Here's a short video of the best few that we put aside during the selection. the other keepers went straight back into the growing on tank
The video captures the best few better than the pictures on this occasion
the pictures came out a bit blurry...
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| The seine netting went well on this occasion, and we managed to catch most of them on the first pass |
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| At the very end, Amanda released the best few into the growing on tank |
There are other good ones too that we didn’t put into this net - these went straight back into the growing on tank… and overall, I’m very happy with the overall quality; and the number of ‘good ones’ is more than usual and in line with the large harvest we enjoyed with this particular spawning. These fry come from the same parent set that produced all 3 of my baby champions, and I would say that the overall quality in this August ‘16 #2 spawning is roughly what I would expect for that parent set; if anything, I think the quality is slightly better than when we ran this parent set last year. And I am hopeful to have one or two from this spawning that will be competitive in the shows next year.
I do need to put some time aside to perform selections on the fry from the May and June spawnings…. These kohaku and tancho are now putting on some size and I need to thin them out to give the best ones the best chance. I am particularly looking forward to reviewing the fry from the ‘sharkey’ spawning – that’s the june 16 spawning; partly because they’re from a different female and I’m interested to see the differences in body shapes and overall quality compared to my previous spawnings.
