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The challenges of keeping too many oama alive for too long

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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.

The bait -> oama -> papio process

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Live oama are indisputably the best inshore bait.  But there’s definitely a process to be able to troll live oama off our watercraft.

Late season oama are spooky and picky about what they eat.  They often shun the baits that have worked early in the season.  One of our fishing hui, Thad, goes out and gathers the natural food they feed on.  We try to  use those baits at the time when the oama feel like eating.  Then I rush the live oama home before they “make” (die) in the aerated bait bucket.  There’s a low mortality rate over the next few days but if one oama dies in the tub due to the catching process, it could kill the rest of its inhabitants.  The oama near the end of the above  video had some loose scales and couldn’t swim completely upright. He looked worse the next day so I had to remove him before he died.  A friend used him “fresh dead” in a boat fishing tournament.

I feed the oama frozen Mysis shrimp from the pet store.  The small sized shrimps are easily consumed.  There’s a very fine line between feeding the oama enough so they survive, and over feeding to the point the tub fouls and they all get sick (and “make”). Over the course of many months, the oama will slowly malnourish and eventually die.  If I fed them more so that they didn’t lose any weight, I’d have a much higher food bill and would have to clean their tub more often. Instead I try to use them within a few weeks.

When the weather conditions allow, we make plans to troll the live oama.  They need to be transported in freshly mixed salt water (I got tired of going to the beach to get sea water) that’s aerated enough to support them on their journey to the fishing spot.

Trolled live oama usually get slammed right away if the fish are around.  That’s the easiest part of the whole process but also the part that makes everything else totally worth it.

Pampered, captive oama

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In case you were wondering how I’ve been able to fish live oama in the Winter, there are a few oama around in some select places, and I’ve been keeping them alive in my tubs at home.  They don’t have to worry about getting mauled by predators and I try to feed them 3 times a day.  Their tub gets scrubbed once a week, and they’re treated for parasites upon entry so they don’t infect their tank mates.

They normally do well for the first month, then after that, maybe 1/4 begin to slowly lose weight.  I try to use the skinny ones before they get too weak since the papio don’t seem to like them when they’re all head and no body.

Not too bad a life and my deal with them is that if I take them out fishing and end up not using them, I set them free.