Three times a day volunteers at the Mount Isa Fish Stocking Group hatchery feed the fingerlings which will hopefully be next season’s catch of barramundi.

Fish Stocking Group vice president Bill Rigby said the three holding tanks held three to four thousand fingerlings divided in tanks by size.

“They all came here at the same time but some grow bigger than others and because they tend to eat the smaller ones we keep the bigger ones together,” Mr Rigby said.

“We got them before Christmas when they were about 20mm long and we want to keep them here to grow them out for another couple of months at least.”

But with the wet season in full swing Mr Rigby can’t afford to be too precise just yet as to when they will be released into Lake Moondarra.

“Maybe if the Dam goes over, we’ll hold over until when that happens,” he said.

“We’ll also keep some in our front tank and grow them out big.”

In the meantime the fingerlings will move to a bigger feed from 1mm diameter pellets to about 5mm.

“The bigger ones (fingerlings) are about 75mm now, we’d like to grow them out to two or three hundred millimeters which would be ideal,” Mr Rigby said.

Mr Rigby said the barramundi were difficult to breed and they only got them every two or three years.

“We can’t translocate the east coast barramundi,” he said.

“These are the Gulf strain of barramundi and the fingerlings come from the hatchery at Karumba because barra only breed in salt water.”

Barra are hermaphrodites and all the fingerlings are male. They start off as a male until they get to around 10 kilos and around the metre mark they change into females, but only in saltwater.

Mr Rigby said they love the hot and humid conditions so it is a good time for fishing at the lake.

“On the weekend they were up at the Junction, fishing off the bank and catching five or six big barra that were 130cm,” he said.

“They like when the water is up around 30 degrees so in wintertime it’s a bit harder to catch the barra out there.”