Aquaponics, Aqua-Culture and Hydro-Ponics are all forms of growing food in water.

Aquaponics are growing plants like cattails, water chestnuts and duck quack. Many plants can be grown in pots or ponds of water but care must be given to not let mosquitoes breed. Several natural methods to keep pots and ponds from being infested include adding a few drops of oil to keep lava from breathing or adding diatonaceous earth which seems to resist bugs in general.

AquaCULTURE includes the growing of fish with your plants. Depending on whether you want to heat the water or not will determine what fish, clams, frogs, snails or crayfish you grow as many can live without heat. Note that raising crayfish with plants means you will be sacrificing plants to the crayfish for food, so choose carefully. Most northern aqua-culturists choose Pumpkin Sunnies or trout is they are not heating the water. The depth of the pond needs to be deep enough to provide a place for the fish over winter.

Now, if you want heated indoor tanks or have a hot water vent near you - you might want to raise these giant Australian redclaw crayfish. or tilapia. I raised the crayfish for about 5 years and love how well they reproduce (up to 500 hatchilings - 3 times a year!) as well as easy to care for. They eat most anything and love water plants of any kind. I used to grow grass for them to graze on and they love chicken feed since they need huge amounts of calcium for good shell production . . and yes - they like grit!

Michael Robinson in Florida is the person to contact for good healthy stock. See: http://farmingcrawfish.com/stick-fins-fish-farm/about_company.html

I wrote a small book about my experience with raising them listed on the right column -Raising Giant Crayfish Up North.

Hydro-Ponics is growing plants in a medium other than soil and the water filters through it. There are several ways of doing this- flooding the root system and aerating the water or spraying the roots periodically with water. Usually the water has added micro-nutrients added.