The challenges of keeping too many oama alive for too long

September 18, 2018 By Scott 4 Comments

Oama #1 has full blown cloudy eyes. Oama #2 has it in both eyes but its eyes aren’t bulging out yet. Oama #3 is beginning to show in its left eye.

My oama tubs were probably triple the recommended capacity because I had planned to provide bait for a few boat and kayak fishing trips. The weather didn’t allow us to fish so the oama sat in crowded conditions for a month. Despite water changes and attempts to improve water quality, oama in all the three tubs began to develop cloudy eyes and lose their coloring. Once that happened they’d die 2 days later and sometimes poison the tub with the chemicals released at death.

Pulled out before they died in the tub. Besides being a little skinny, they look ok.

As a last ditch effort I put the remaining 10 oama of one tub in an aerated bucket with new water, and planned to use them for bait the next day. I also took a bucket of healthy oama. Half of the weak oama died on the drive to the beach, whereas the healthy oama in the other bucket were fine.

When weak oama were mixed with healthy fish, the healthy fish didn’t weaken right away so it doesn’t seem like they were dying from a contagious disease, they were just worn out from living in poor water conditions for too long. Oama that freshly died in the tubs or were euthanized worked well enough trolled, so they weren’t wasted.

Summary for those trying to keep a lot of oama alive:

If you’re gonna keep oama in over crowded conditions for an extended period of time, change the water as often as you can. The poor water quality will eventually weaken them.
If they are all in a weakened state, the toxin a dying fish emits will kill others. If the rest are relatively strong, one dying fish won’t kill them instantly but will worsen the water quality.
If the fish have cloudy eyes and seem “off color”, they may not be too contagious to the others but will probably die in the next few days. It’s better to remove them before they die in the tub.
Often fish start dying at the same time in more than one tub. I used to think I was cross-contaminating the tubs but now I think that the fish just have a certain amount of time they can handle poor water conditions before giving up.

Reader’s Tip: Keep your oamas alive and healthy until you can use them

July 18, 2017 By Scott 2 Comments

Mark on Kauai sent this tip with photos to show how he keeps his oama alive and healthy until he has time to use them for live bait. He puts the oama in a bucket of sea water lined with a black trash bag that has sand on the bottom. He says the black liner keeps the water cool, and the sand calms the oama down. Mark uses a simple air pump to oxygenate the bucket and a water pump and bell siphon to recirculate water between another bucket of seawater, but you could just do intermittent water changes when the water gets too warm or soiled with fish waste. Ammo Lock or Prime, purchased from a pet store, will neutralize the toxic ammonia the fish produce.

Here’s a nice Hanalei white papio caught on one of his frisky live oama.

Thanks for the tip Mark, and I hope you get more papio before the season is over!

Why are my captive oamas dying?

September 2, 2014 By Scott Leave a Comment

the good ole days

The oamas I caught early in the season lived in plastic tubs with external filtration for as long as 4 weeks. Eventually all the tubs had bouts of mass die offs and now I’m leery about risking losing another batch.

oama apartment living

To avoid putting all my oamas in one basket, so to speak, I now have them spread across 5 gallon buckets. The oamas haven’t experienced mass die offs in the buckets, but aren’t happy either and haven’t been eating.

I suspect some disease like “marine ich” is eventually spreading and reproducing in the tubs, and also believe the dying oamas emit some kind of toxic chemical that causes the others to die within minutes. This is the dark side of oama raising I guess.

I’ve treated some of the tubs for “marine ich” with some success, and try to pull dying oamas out before they can affect the others. If you have any additional advice please contact me. It’s very sad and frustrating to try to keep the little guys long enough to use them, only to lose a bunch over night.

Update – 9/12/2014 : Per the nice folks at Coral Fish Hawaii, I treated a few tubs and sick fish with copper. If I caught the ich early enough, the fish made a complete recovery, and the tubs have hosted fish without killing them. Keeping the oxygen infusion up seems to be more important than stabilizing the water temperature and salinity.