Day 38- A long working day.

Feeding session on cages with Felix (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Today I finished the commissions concerning the trial. Meanwhile the daily routine tasks and water quality parameters such as Ammonia, Nitrites, Nitrates, Alkalinity, Potassium and etcetera went on within the great help of Oscar and Jemimah.

Coming back home I took some pictures of beautiful lilies growing on the ground in the forest near to my house.

Lilies growing on the ground (credits:Emilie Devic).

Day 37- Where everything begins.

Tilapia egg at stage 0 (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Again in the hatchery site, I had a very big luck for having free time, a borrowed microscope and some fries and eggs for observing them.

After spawning, the fertilized eggs had the maturation of embryo (eye pigmentation spots, developing of back bones, and organs), then after hatching the larvae has to reabsorbing the yolk sac whilst waiting the gastro enteric tube to  getting ready for feeding and digestion. It was something absolutely great observing tilapias before they are grown up in ponds and lakes.

Tilapia egg at stage1, the black bones development and eye pigmentation is almost finished (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Tilapia larvae on microscope (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Video of tilapia larvae in a becker (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Day 36- The brood stocks maintenance and the night.

Brood-stock harvest for sexing (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Because of some commissions to do about the growth trial, I was sent to the hatchery of fish farm. When I had some free time, the manager guided me to a visit of the buildings and passages of eggs and fries production. Then I had also the luck to assist the sexing, counting and separation of brood-stocks.

Brood-stock sexing, a male on left and a female on right (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

In the afternoon I had to come back home in the dark, fortunately for finishing the way by motorbike I was brought up to my accommodation in the red sand road lighten up by only the moon.

Day 35- Return to field activity.

Reaching experimental cages by canoe (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

In the early morning, I finally came back to the nursery for meeting supervisor Amos and feeder Felix for having a report and description of the previous day storm.

Then the damaged buckets were switched with others new, after checking and recording their weight (for tare estimation in daily feed intake).

Sunday afternoon passed very quiet and smooth until the end of the day.

Recording data on floating office (the platform) (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Day 33 and 34- Hard sun and hard storm.

Grass hopper on platform below the sunlight (credits: Nicole Pelusio).

In the morning since the sky was cleaned the sunlight was too much strong for me. In the half of the day I started having fever and sweating a lot. Feeling really weak I had to stop and reach the shore for seek some shade and rest. Then the owner of fish farm saw me and took me to Accra for having blood tests, making sure that it wasn’t a Malaria prelude. Because of the time of analyses, I had to spend one night in Accra for waiting the results.

When I left the fish farm, a severe rain storm blocked workers for a couple of hours, interrupting everything, either the electric power. Unfortunately some of trial buckets containing the feed lost the lid because of strong wind and rain.

The sever storm arriving in the fish farm (credits:Nicole Pelusio).

Day 32- Second partial sampling.

Thomas, Jemimah and me counting and weighting fish (credits:Nicole Pelusio).

The last partial sampling was taken today.

From each cage we fished casually random representative samples. Then each fish was counted and weighted for gaining body weight average.

After the sampling the subjects were re-put inside their own cage. 

The sampling equipe (credits:Nicole Pelusio).

The team worked perfectly and quickly, and after sampling we spent a while chatting before coming back to working on other duties.

(credits: Nicole Pelusio).

Day 31- Water spectro analyses and fasting day.

Water spectro analyses with Oscar on shore (credits:Nicole Pelusio).

Today our fish were fasting waiting the next following day sampling. While the weather was not so good, I spent the day in lovely company of water technician Oscar for analyzing some left samples for spectrophotometer.

Before coming back home I spent some time in company of some tiger fish on the shore: more voracious than tilapias!

Tiger fish (credits: Nicole Pelusio).