Breeding Information

Unfortunately, yellowbelly do not breed naturally in your dam. You will only get out what you put in so every few years you should add some more fingerlings to your pond.

We breed all our own fingerlings here at Aquablue. Male yellowbelly are ready to spawn from the 1st September and females from the 1st October. The season usually runs through to the end of January. Yellowbelly will readily roe up in your dams and during this period when you catch them you will be astounded by the numbers of eggs they have inside them. Unfortunately, without artificial help, these fish that are a river species will not breed in a farm dam. They will certainly survive and thrive in the dam, just not breed.

Even for us as experienced aquaculturalists, yellows unfortunately are not the easiest animals to breed and we seem to have quite a bit of trouble some years to get numerous viable breeding to occur. Unlike Silver Perch, the Yellowbelly have a complex mating ritual and only one female to a tank is preferred. Yellowbelly will not breed naturally in our tanks so we use hormones to ensure that they do breed. We inject the females with Pregnyl (human chorionic gonadotrophin) at 500i.u/kg. The males we sometimes inject with 250i.u./kg but generally this is not required. By injecting the female you start her ovulating and she will spawn a set time after injection if all parameters are correct.

Here at Aquablue we capture our broodstock yellowbelly from our farm dams. These fish “live the life of Riley” just swimming and feasting all year until breeding time. At Aquablue we use 1400 litre conical bottom, black fibreglass breeding tanks that we breed our goldens in when captured from the dam. Breeding tanks are kept dark and at 25°C and fish spawn 32 – 40 hours after we inject them. Eggs hatch 28 – 32 hours later.

Yellowbelly are harder to get just right with the breeding, we have some batches that spawn but do not hatch. When we do get a good spawning it is usually 100%. A major advantage of yellowbelly is their survival in the pond. We release the larvae into the pond at day 5 after hatching when they are ready to start feeding. We have generally over 80% survival of larvae in our nursery ponds. This is always much higher than Silvers or Bass which are in the 10 to 30% survival range. Yellowbelly do not strip so we need to get them to spawn naturally themselves in the tank. The most important factor is to try and ensure that the female likes the male. Wherever possible we try to use matched pairs. These are a male and female fish that were paired up together in the pond and we have caught together in the net.

The 2007 breeding season has commenced and the first 3 batches through the hatchery have all been 100% successful. This is shaping up to being an excellent season of us.