Considering CPD tank

[fishscale]

Right now I’ve got 2 10g’s; one with some tetras temporarily being housed there while my 55g emersed tank fills in with plants, the other is a shrimp tank overrun with RCS. Once my 55 finishes, I am considering scrapping these two and setting up one 20g L for CPD’s, maybe with a couple of otos and my RCS. I’ve been interested in CPD’s for a while, but haven’t read up much on them yet. Like my other tanks, I’d like to do a lot of research and be prepared for them before I decide to get them. I’d like some feedback on this idea. Ideally, I would like to breed the CPD’s in this tank. So, first, would-be tank specs:

Tank: 20L
Light: 1x55W CF
Filter: 2x sponge filters (might DIY these, also, considering placement. Do CPD’s like current?)
Other specs dependent on answers to questions

Can/have CPD’s been bred in just a heavily planted tank without removing eggs/fry from parent tank? I don’t have room for a fry tank, so I’d like to just provide a lot of cover for the eggs and fry and just hope the parents don’t find them. Also, will shrimp or otos eat the eggs?

If the answers to these questions are right, I may even scape the tank. Right now, I am thinking of having a very large amount of java moss, riccia, and najas (guppy) grass in the tank for spawning medium and fry/egg cover. I would also probably include some stem plants, maybe some variety of hygro polysperma, rotala sp. green, ludwigia, etc, to give the parents some cover that isn’t where the fry are. I don’t really care if any of the RCS get eaten, I have a ton of them, and I know the adults won’t be anyway, so they’ll just keep breeding.

[Crazedpuffer]

I think the adults can be kept with the fry in a moderate size tank with lots of plants, but the shrimp will eat most the eggs.

[L777]

Fishscale,
welcome to the forum!!

Here’s my experience:
1) 6 male / 3 female wild caught adult CPDs, kept for about 4 months in a community tank with 4 adult bushynose plecos, dozens of young plecos, dozens of guppies of various sizes, 2 kuhli loaches, 2 subadult Sterbai corys, and a thicket of java moss… no fry ever observed.
2) same 9 adult CPDs moved into their own 10 gallon tank, densely overgrown with java moss, + 5 young bushynose plecos… within two weeks, there were about (on average) 6 new fry appearing each day for a couple of weeks while I was feeding live microworms many many times a day (basically every time I walked past the tank, often several times per “sitting”). Almost no new fry since I cut back on the microworm feedings. I removed the new fry every day or two, but left the last week’s worth of newly-appearing fry in the tank with the adults, and the total fry count rose to nearly thirty without observable losses to the total count. My fry stayed near the surface, above the mat of moss, while the adults rarely came out from under/in the moss. Several times I did see the fry either ignored by the hunting adults, or able to evade them when they got close enough to take a snap at them.

So… sounds like your tank is potentially at risk for predation of eggs/fry, but with enough dense cover, there may still be a chance for some of them to survive. The adult CPDs are known to prey on the eggs and fry, if they can find them, and aren’t already stuffed to the gills on intended live food.

The “breeding” section of this forum has a lot of good discussions in it. Steve’s input (ste1200) is especially useful, since he has egg-layer breeding down to a bit of a controlled experimental science, and thousands of hatched eggs of various species “under his belt”. The basic approach, if maximizing fry is the goal, is to condition females and males separately, then once they are brought together in the breeding tank, watch until courtship behavior is observed, then take the adults out before they eat their spawn.

Best fishes to your efforts!

[fishscale]

I’m not looking to breed for commercial purposes or anything, just for fun and maybe to stock some more nano tanks. It would be nice to get just a couple of surviving fry each spawn. I’m mainly concerned about shrimp eating the eggs.

[fishscale]

Also, if I were to set up, say, a 5 gallon tank to raise the fry until they were large enough to be not eaten, how do you move the fry? Turkey baster? How large would the fry have to get until the parents are no longer a threat? Could the older fry start preying on the younger ones?

[L777]

Moving fry between tanks: I just herded them with a net into a small plastic cup, and then transferred them in the cup, rather than giving them net and out-of-water stress. Found that the fry were small enough to slip through the holes of the standard green mesh nets if I took too long convincing them to swim into the cup, so switched to brine shrimp net for the chasing part.

Fry eat fry world: since I was removing the fry daily, I noticed that after the first fry had been in the new tank for a little over a week, they were big enough to start “hunting” the newest additions. Didn’t see any actually get eaten, but the older fry were definitely going after the new free-swimmers.

[Author]

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