Reply To: Introduction…
It’s a month later, so here’s a report on my tank of CPD’s:
The best news is that I now have fry. I noticed the first fry about 2 weeks ago – it was so tiny I almost mistook it for a bit of flake food, but as it saw moving against the current of the water I had a closer look and noticed it had 2 eyes.
Since then, new fry have joined the group at the rate of about 1 per day (this with 5 females and 1 male – I was wrong about having 2 males, I’m pretty sure I only have one).
The fry numbers peaked at about 10-11 (they’re hard to count), and actually decreased for a few days (down to only 6 visible fry). I -believe- but am not sure that this may have because I introduced 2 cherry-red shrimp into the tank to help deal with a hair algae problem I have in the tank (the nitrates in my local tap water are VERY high and the hair algae was getting annoying). I never actually -saw- the shrimp eat any fry, but they did spend time swimming through the part of the tank where the fry swim (which is about 5-10 cm from the top), and I thought it might be possible they’d grab a fry as they swam past and munch them.
Testing this theory, I removed the shrimp and within a day or two, the number of fry has gone up again, and I’m currently back up to 10.
I’ve also noticed that some of the fry are now noticeably bigger than the others, so presumably they’re the older ones who are now starting to grow up a bit. These bigger ones are a little more “daring” and swim a little closer to the bottom of the tank where the parents are. (The parents almost never rise up off the bottom of the tank, which seems to provide a kind of natural behavioural protection of the fry from their parents).
I’m currently feeding the fry “liquifry” a few times a day, and the adults get Hikari micropellets alternated with frozen baby brine shrimp. I’ve never seem the baby fry go for the baby brine shrimp themselves, but others report that this is a good food for them, so maybe I just can’t see the fry eating them because they’re so small (?).
I’ve tried breeding live baby brine shrimp and putting them into the tank too, but this makes me a bit nervous because when I put live food in the tank, the adults wander a bit further from the bottom of the tank, and get very near the fry, and I worry that they might mistake a fry for a brine shrimp and eat them, so I’ve stopped doing this. I know that I -could- separate out the babies from the adults, but I don’t want to buy another tank just yet if I don’t have to, and leaving them in the same tank seems to be working OK so far…