Reply To: Starting over…
Atlantis,
keep your eye out for clumps of java moss to come through. This stuff is like living spawning mops, doesn’t really have roots to speak of, so it doesn’t need to be “planted” (but it’s not really a floating plant), and CPDs love to hide — and lay eggs — in it. Added bonus: once it takes over the tank, the CPDs can’t find all their eggs to eat them, even if the adults are still in the tank (and well fed). Must be about the lowest maintenance water plant there is. Good light and fertilizer help it, but even low light won’t kill it or stop it from spreading.
Can’t go wrong with it. It does tend to take over the tank, but for a critter that comes from vegetation-choked wetlands, that is only a positive.
Here’s a shot of my breeding tank (10g, about 6 or 7 of that consumed by java moss):
Within a week of adding the adult CPDs to this moss-engulfed tank last month, I had new fry appearing every day! (There’s also a small piece of java fern in the front, as well as some green algae spreading across the top of the java moss. Algae says water change was needed, to remove the nutrients the algae was growing off of, but I didn’t dare change *anything* once the fry started to show up!!)
edit: btw, the 9 adults (6M/3F) are all hiding in the moss as usual. If you squint at the blurry things at the top of the water, you might make out a dozen or so CPD fry… bellies bulging from all the growing-in-all-the-live-plants-after-coming-from-the-live-snails infusoria they graze on! :roll: :wink: 