Wild life in my garden, interesting observation

[oafpatroll]

How well does tilapia deal with cold?

Mine had no problem with highveld winter temps at all.

[nkosi]

Imagine my surprise when I learned that Tilapia are a problem up here in Far North Queensland Australia. Soon after arriving here in 2007, I went fishing - in all the canals in Cairns used for storm water control, there are signs asking people to report Tilapia & destroy them if caught. They have spread around the world like Indian Mynahs.

[Antlion]

Even here the way Nile Tilapia(Niloticus) have spread has caused some concern, they grow faster than the indigenous Mozambique Tilapia(Blue Kurper) and cross breed with them too. Huge market as they easy to farm .A kurper is not a kurper, we have a few strains .

[Sean KZN]

I actually went to great lengths to procure the purest Mozambique tilapia available. They do better at cooler temps than the Nile, and of course the indigenous thing. Winter here, it got down to 6 degrees Celsius this year, they managed with few fatalities.
This is remarkable as they are living off the algae in the water and whatever insects may drop in.
When I was feeding them, they multiplied so much that come winter, combined with poor water quality I took many kg's of dead fish out. They get an infection, Whirls disease, which I was hoping would wipe them out(normally it would), then I could restart with a better plan. The local mongooses were extremely happy to eat the dead fish, as I dumped them the next morning they'd be gone.
So they seem to have become resistant to the disease.

I do want to get some catfish or bass to take care of them, the only problem is getting stock of either.

[geopat]

Those tilapia are a plague we had them in a pond and the.numbers got out of control so we drained the pond ditched the fish and scrubbed the pond.after refilling we had hundreds of tilapia within a month, their eggs were on the plants that we put back and before we knew it we were back to square one the only way I know of.removing them without ditching all plants and cleaning the pond is rotenone which is a short lived toxin that targets fish, this was used in the cederburg to remove alien fish from the river by Algeria and seems to have been very successful