We harvested our first fry pond of 2009 yesterday, the fry in all the mud ponds have been doing really well and even though we split our Shiro Utsuri spawning into two ponds, one pond in particular was looking rather full.

We decided to do a quick harvest to thin them down and even though it was a really rough net, it looked like there were about 20,000 fry in the transport tank when we'd finished.

Dan, The student that we have on work experience got a chance to have a go at first selection with us and we spent yesterday afternoon and this morning selecting which ones to put back in the mud pond.

Half went back into the same mud pond that they had come from and the other half went back into the other Shiro pond which isn't so heavily stocked. I went to speak to Mark after lunch whilst he was feeding the fry and he showed me the pond we had harvested yesterday - there were so many fry in it that it looked like we hadn't touched it!!

Next week will be full on harvesting and selecting although Dan goes home at the end of this week so it will be just Mark and I.

Lisa