After a short bus trip down a very bumpy road (and past some cows, buffalo, and cornfields) we arrived at the main farm. The main farm is enormous (10 hectares, 24 acres) and runs alongside a canal that provides a year-round supply of fresh water. The water is collected in an elevated reservoir so that all of the tanks and ponds can be supplied via gravity.
One of the major products of this farm is neon and cardinal tetras, and they also raise rummynose and emperor tetras. The climate in Saigon is too hot for tetras to live outdoor in ponds, so most of the indoor space was devoted to row upon row of tetra grow-out tanks. Individual pairs of tetras spawn in tiny glass boxes in dimly-lit rooms, and then the eggs or fry are transferred into smallish tanks to grow up a bit.
Earlier reading led me to believe that feeding the tetra fry would be a big ordeal, with rotifer or moina ponds taking up a bunch of the surface area. Nope! When I asked what they feed the fry Binh just shrugged and said ‘TetraMin. Ground up really small.’ It’s possible that I totally misunderstood his answer, but I definitely didn’t see any food-production tanks other than a few brine shrimp hatcheries next to some baby angelfish in a different building.
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- I can’t express how very, very many cardinal tetras there were in this room
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- Rummynose tetras (which until yesterday I thought weren’t bred in captivity)
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- A stack of breeding boxes, each about 2 liters
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- Close-up of a breeding box with a bit of netting to keep the parents away from their tasty eggs
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- Row on row of breeding boxes
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- Each breeding box has one pair of adults.
There were lots of little tanks with spec-sized hatchlings but I didn’t want to make everyone wait while I sorted out a proper macro photo.