Antone know where to buy fingerling drum?

Now THAT'S a good one......

I seriously doubt anybody is producing them. I might think about it, if there were some money involved.......

Interesting species, fun to catch, not bad eatin' if you bleed 'em out soon as you catch 'em, but not very high on anybody's list of sought after species.

'Ceptin' of course maybe yourself......

You can catch a lot of them in the Neches River at times.

I'd be curious if you find any for sale, might buy myself some for my lake.....

I will buy and have a tank for hauling. I need for bait purposes.How much money are we talking?

I have never heard of anyone selling them.

well, about money.....

If it was an off the shelf thing, it would be easy to put a price.

This would take study, broodfish acquisition, hatchery apparatus construction, hatchery time, pond time, harvest, holding and transport.

Just guessing that it would be cost prohibitive. I'd say more than hundreds, but less than tens of thousands.

I once did a batch of hybrid buffalo fish for a fish farm, but I needed a sale of 100,000 fingerlings at a dime a whack to make it cost effective to do.

It could be done I'm sure, just not sure if it would be worth it.

Oh your an actual fish farmer! Gotcha. Yea I can wait on the rains to come!! I usually can catch em if there is plenty of water. Thanks for feedback

I have been studying freshwater drum spawning and have found that they can reproduce in certain ponds. I might just have to grow my own.

Interesting idea. Worth a try. Good luck.

I'd be glad to help any way I can if you'll share information with me.

reminds me of a time a guy called and said, "You gotta help me save my puffer fish." So I asked him, "How long you been keepin' puffer fish?" He told me, "more than 20 years." So I told him, "I know one thing for sure, you know a lot more about puffer fish than I do." with the help of a dog doctor, the three of us saved the puffer fish.

I have never studied up on spawning freshwater drum (Aplodinotus grunniens, aka "sheepshead, gaspergou, drum, goufish, etc.") but would assume it would be similar to what they do in saltwater, which is complicated and convoluted. Hence my trepidation trying to name a cost.

Now if you can get drum by tossing a few adult males and females in a clean pond together, that's another matter. May be just a question of proper substrates and fertilizer regimes. I don't even know if they can be trained to take commercial feeds. May start looking it up now you get my curiousity in gear....

I got a few ponds too.

Well Fishbreeder your a heck of a lot smarter than I am. Maybe if you can read up a little and put into laymans terms for little old me thet would be great! That would give me a heads start on my project!! Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Crazy thing about drum is they can spawn within two years of being spawned themselves. I found that pretty cool. But there was alot of words that went over my head. Thus the request for help from you Fishbreeder.

I done jest a tad of lookin' up.....

From what I read we'll need to set up a McDonald jar type incubation system for the eggs. I got that, may take a bit to assemble all the parts, been more'n 20 years since I used it.

Then some ripe breeding stock, males and females, as many as we can get but at least two or three females and twice that for males. They need taken from the river close to ovulation. Then they can be injected with a hormone and spawned in the hatchery. Getting breeding stock in good shape is always among the biggest challenges of this type project. Plus, we'll have to apply for a permit and pay for the fish we use, even though there is no limit on drum and with a fishing license you can catch and kill all you want, but you cannot reproduce fish taken from the wild in Texas at a private hatchery without paying the state for them.

Basically just another example of some of the draconian regs fish farmers in Texas must deal with that are not issues in other states. I go to Florida for breeding bass, they only care I buy a license and spend my money while there, what I do with the fish, as long as I do not exceed my limit, and don't waste, is my business.

So, there's a plan. If you (somebody) can get me the breeding stock, I'll build the apparatus and put a small pond up to raise the fry.

On the economics, I'll split revenues from the project 50/50, if there are any.....

Wow! That would be great. Do you reside in Brazoria? unfortunately for me I'm in Irving a suburb of Dallas. Darn it. If you can find someone to do the deal please keep me in the loop I'd like to know how successful you were on this endeavor.

Seems like a fun idea!

I have caught them in small (10 acre) ponds so they can reproduce in ponds it would seem!