unspecified

How many guppies do they raise here? This many:

Vanishing-point perspective, illustrated with guppy ponds

There were nearly as many ponds devoted to other livebearers: platys, swordtails, mollys. In the case of the swordtails a single giant pond was subdivided with hanging nets. I’m not sure what the difference is between the different pond arrangements.

These are also all fish that I think of as needing the exact opposite water (hard, alkaline) as tetras, but as best I can tell they don’t mess with the water chemistry for anything but discus.

Discus must not yield to mass-production techniques, because the discus tanks looked just like discus tanks everywhere.

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.

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.

This section of the farm consisted of many tarp-lined ponds full of cut lengths of pvc pipe. The pipe were, presumably, full of adult ancistrus (‘plecos’) of various kinds sitting on eggs, but no adults were visible through the glare.

This technique seems pretty uncomplicated — since ancistrus are good parents they just leave them alone in the ponds and scoop out and sort the young as needed.

Saigon Aquarium’s ‘small farm’ raises about 100,000 Corydoras catfish per year. Green, albino (both C. aeneus I presume), panda, and sterbai.

There was a bit of a language gap between me and the tour guide (mostly due to my being too excited to speak slowly) and a BIG language gap between me and the breeder, but the system seemed pretty straightforward. Large groups of big, fat adults live in small open-top tile ponds. Water hyacinth floats in the ponds with the adults, and the roots inevitably become thick with eggs.

The hyacinth is moved onto small hatching tanks, and then the fry moved to successively larger grow-out tanks until eventually they’re turned loose in their own small ponds. Then, when the shop gets an order, groups of young adults are netted out of the ponds and moved back into glass tanks for a few days of inspection, sorting, and quarantine before shipping out.

(click photos to enlarge)

Only some of the breeder ponds had hyacinth in them. I asked Binh for more details about how they decide what numbers to raise of which species, and he said they’re in constant communication with their wholesalers and that they don’t always raise as many fish as they have capacity for. It seems logistically complicated to me, having to predict demand many months down the road, but I suppose that’s true for any kind of farm.

On a whim while on the train ride to Ho Chi Minh City I wrote to the ‘contact us’ address at Saigon Aquarium asking if I could visit their breeding facilities. Much to my surprise I got a speedy ‘yes’ reply. HoaBinh Dinh contacted me shortly thereafter on WhatsApp and offered to pick us up at our hotel and drive us out for a tour.

Needless to say, I immediately rearranged touring plans and freed up an afternoon. I feel a bit guilty about depriving Dee of the acrobatics show we’d been planning to see… but not /that/ guilty.

Ornamental fish importers generally talk about mass-bred fish coming from Eastern Europe or the ‘Far East’. It turns out that in this case there’s a pretty tight connection between the two. Binh, our guide, studied abroad in Prague. The owner of Saigon Aquarium lives in Prague. And, Binh picked us up in a bus because his other in-town errand was picking up a bunch of Czech friends at the airport who had been on holiday in Phú Quốc.

The ride out to Cu Chi was fascinating — the highway was lined with an endless row of shops and restaurants, mile after mile… eventually the landscape opened up a bit and there were some industrial parks and one enormous hammock camp. We never saw anything that much resembled countryside, but eventually there was enough open space for Saigon Aquarium’s first small facility. In this space they tranship wild-caught fish and fish from other farms, and also raise Corydoras.

Next — Corydoras breeding.