Tiger shrimp in the Caribbean

The tigers are living up to their fast growth reputation,

We have 200,000, 25 day old in our first production pond that are 2.8 grams average weight. They should double in size in the next 5 days. They went from 1 gram to 2.8 in the last 7.

That means over 5 grams at Day 30. Our white shrimp are doing good if they reach 2 grams in 30 days.

I'm creating a second "mega" family with more wild caught ones this year. I'll maintain the two mega families, that will get inbred. But I will only cross males of one with females of the other and vice versa for our production ponds, meaning we'll have hybrid vigor in all our production stocks.

Work is fun. Almost as fun as spearfishing right now. ya man, :thumbsup2:

Oh yeah....we had them tested for all the known shrimp viruses. There are some really bad ones and I know there is concern up in the Gulf of Mexico regarding this issue. Test in two labs. U of Arizona and my friend's company in Thailand. Clean, clean clean. Specific pathogen Free. Incredible luck that these just landed in our lap.

Well here you go Marco,
We have four buildings full of these tanks where we grow and mate the shrimp. We keep them inside, straight from the hatchery for biosecurity. It takes about 8 months for the white shrimp to reach maturity and about a year for the monodon. (tiger shrmp)
We have another two buildings for growing the larvae. 270 cubic meters of water each in 14 and 10 ton tanks. (one cubic meter is about 250 gallons)

Lots of pumps and air blowers. It's pretty cool, the whole process of pumping, filtering, growing the larval feeds....after 36 years I still get a big kick out of it. We chlorinate and filter down to 1 micron all incoming sea water to keep out contaminates and even larval predators. We have to grow our own algae to feed the young larvae also. Operating room cleanliness.
We produce about 600 million baby shrimp per year here but with the tigers the number will go down because you need less since they grow so big.
Next year at this time we hope to be stocking only tigers on this farm. The price for large monodon tails is US$12.50 per lb right now. The smaller white shrimp is about $4.50 Needless to say, the owner of this farm is stoked.
I'll get more pics tomorrow from the larval room. We have some nice sized post larvae tigers there.
The pics of the shrimp here aren't good. Hard to get a shot of them under the water with my iPhone. They're about 4-7 grams in size. Growing really fast in our tanks.
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Quote from sdeisen

Awesome farm, looks just like the place my buddy works that grows out cobia.
Cool to see, thanks

My dive buddy here before ran a cobia farm here. They had a hatchery that looks like this. Pretty much the same for all of them. Tanks, pipes, blowers, airlines....yep.

They grew them out in cages in the sea.

Fiberglass. One of the larval units has cement tanks. All the reservoirs are cement.

Here's a few more pics. One is a bunch of tiger post larvae about 35 days old. They should have been moved out to a pond about 10 days ago but we didn't have any empty.
the other pics are the larval rearing room and algae lab and mass culture. We have to isolate and keep a pure culture of diatoms to feed them the first 3 days of life. Without it, they all die. We have the same algae running here for over 7 years.

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Amazing. The white shrimp we're growing in Belize are doing good if they grow one gram per week. Our first tiger test pond gained 8 grams in 14 days. Hooollllllly Shhheett. haha.
But **** this. I gotta go kill some fish. We've had low salinity here for a month now after those tropical storms dumped all that rain in Mexico. Must be that. In eight years, I've never seen the salinity drop like this.
But now it's coming back up. Fish are gonna die. I hope we finally find some dogs this week. ya man.

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Marco, when the salinity drops below 28 ppt, the young larvae....for the first 8 days or so, get stressed. They like it to be 29-33. They can take it up to 35 which is open sea water salinity.

But since the salinity started dropping about 4 weeks ago, we haven't seen any schools of dog snapper in our usual spots. Only a few lone wolf ones hanging around. Only seen a couple cuberas and a few muttons. No grouper either. Maybe they headed south running ahead of the water? Or went deeper? I haven't measured the salinity out on the reef though so I can't say for sure.

Either that, or the assholes with gill nets are cleaning out our spots again. This happened a couple years ago and it took a few months for the fish to come back.

The test pond gained 10.5 grams in the last 14 days. That's .75 grams per day. Unbelievable. The shrimp in this pic are mostly around 35 to 40 grams. 56 days out of the hatchery. It takes at least 150 days for the whilte shrimp to get that big on farms here in Belize.

Yes, they eat a LOT more per day. BUT, the food conversion ratio (FCR) is very low. We're estimating it at 1.1:1 right now (1.1 lbs of feed for 1 lb of shrimp) which is far below industry standards.
We are also running these at low density targeting only 2,400 lbs per acre (vs up to 20,000 in the new intensive systems) so the shrimp consume a higher ratio of natural food produced in the ponds in the way of copepods, protozoans etc that the shrimp also feed on.