Tilapia is well-known as the freshwater fish from the tilapiine cichlid tribe. This fish is relatively easy to breed because of its adaptive behavior to aquaculture environment. If you are interested in spawning these freshwater creatures, there are several ways of spawning tilapia you can try.
1. Spawning by Using Mating Couples
The common way of breeding tilapia is by providing the mating couples. You need to provide the large tanks for them to mate. When the couples are about to spawn, they will mark the certain territory. When the females lay the eggs, the males will fertilize the eggs. The eggs will hatch. The parents will take care of their fry. Later, you can feed the fry with the brine shrimps.
2. Spawning Mono-sex
Another way of spawning tilapia is by raising male-only groups. The reason to raise the monosex tilapia is the male ones grow faster and produce a maximum size than females. So, it affects the density of the fish regarding the quantity and quality. There are several methods of spawning monosex tilapia.
- Spawning by Using Hormones
One of the methods to spawn tilapia is by using hormones or is often called the sex-reversal method. In this method, you feed the fry with certain hormone dose through their diets. The fry will grow and turn into males despite their natural sex if they are exposed to the great number of male hormones.
- Spawning by Using Hybrids
Another spawning method is using hybrids. This method will crossbreed certain species of tilapia. You can crossbreed the males from Zanzibar or Blue tilapia species with females from Mozambique or Nile tilapia species. The fry resulted from the crossbreed combination will be mostly male. This way will not always produce 100% males due to genetic differences in tilapia descendants.
- Spawning by Using Male YY Technology
This spawning method uses male YY technology. In this method, you will develop YY chromosome males. You need to treat the first fry produced by the parents with estrogen. The purpose is to produce all XY females. Those females will mate with males that are known as XY. Later this generation will mate with XX females. The fry produced from this generation will produce XY male fry. You can find out the YY breeder fish because they only spawn XY male fry tilapia.
Based on the following ways described, you can choose the way of spawning tilapia that is suitable and easy for you.
References
http://www.tilapia.ws/breeding-monosex.php
https://thefishsite.com/articles/a-quick-guide-to-tilapia-breeding-and-farming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilapia
www.aquaticcommunity.com/tilapia/breeding.php