Day 18- Getting more confident with tasks and joining of tilapia harvesting.

Worker with tilapia (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Today work started having a more quite rhythm, and the feeder Felix deserved two days off after his huge patience in the first rushing days of trial. For switching him Eric came to join me, who was really interested and kind in helping with the daily tasks.

fish stocked on boat after harvest (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Since we were very on time with feeding, I exploited some free time for watching the harvest of tilapias ready to be processed and sold in market. The harvest men prepared a vacuum machine sucking the tilapias inside cages and put them in plastic boxes with slurry ice (a mixture of water and ice). Then they picked up the plastic boxes on board and send them to the shore, for reaching quickly the slaughter unit of fish farm.

Harvest time (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Day 17- End of DO, pH and temperature calibration and first spectrophotometer analysis.

Water quality analyses on-shore (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Finally the crucial starting days passed: in first days we had to check DO, pH and temperature variation in the different depths of the cages before and after feeding sessions, at fixed times per day. This helped us to have a general idea of how feeding and flowing in the lake affects or not these parameters in the water column.

Spectrophotometer within water samples (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Moreover the spectrophotometer arrived and we got the water analysis of today and last week. Before measure them, we put samples in a shaded place for gaining the environmental temperature, then we shacked them for a while, finally measured them with the tool.