L777
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Gorgeous cichlids, all of them (plus a nice gourami)! I wish I could find the variety of kribs around my area that your collection boasts.
I’ve heard a lot of accounts (second hand and first) about the difficulty of managing discus social dynamics. Have yours taken much effort in that regard? Looks like the ones pictured are all thriving.
Ditto to the java fern! Tough to kill, not that you’d want to. And they propagate themselves — new complete plants, roots and all, grow out of the tips of older leaves.
Another hardy favorite of mine has always been Aponogeton crispus. Sort of a “poor-man’s swordplant,” and great for beginners. About 20 years ago I had a 30 gallon tank with several bulbs of these that sent up flower stalks. They pollinated each other and dropped seeds that germinated in the gravel! Great fun! And this was under a cheap kitchen under-cabinet fluorescent tube, with no supplemental CO2 or fertilizer (other than what the arowana produced), and dark black gravel.
cwhite,
your alkalinity is very similar to their native conditions. However, they appear to be quite adaptable to a wide range of conditions. I had over 75 fry come from ph less than 6.2 (just off the color chart), and in water much warmer than their home waters. I’d say give ‘er a go, and let us know what your tank conditions were like after you’re successful!Good tips! As for the infusoria growing on the java moss — yes, for sure. Mine were at least a week old before they could take on a microworm, and BBS took a few days longer again. I fed them OSI powdered imitation infusoria fry food, but am sure most of their growth the first week came from the moss inhabitants.
Useful info! Did the Ottowa fellow mention whether he conditions, then spawns, then conditions… or lets them spawn continuously? (The paper that describes them as a species suggests that they may be continuous spawners in the wild.)
maximumbob and algenco,
many thanks for the leads. Looks like plenty of info to get started.Also, I just finally noticed this thread that celestialdude started a couple of months ago over in the aquatic plants section:
http://www.celestialpearldanio.com/viewtopic.php?t=555
(where he gives great instructions, complete with pictures, on how to make, of all things, a DIY CO2 reactor! :oops: )
I suppose more follow-ons to this thread ought to jump back over there instead!
Another food item: my shoal of F1s are in a bushynose pleco breeding tank. When I add pelletized tiny sticks of brine shrimp, papa bushynose comes out and starts working on them. As he does (he kinda gets into it), a cloud of brine shrimp pellet particles and “dust” float up into the water — the young CPDs swarm the water right above the pleco and dart around snapping up all the bits. Good natural source of red for their fins, too (although they attack live BBS and microworms with just as much fervor)! Reminds me — time to change the microworm culture…
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.
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!
Well, actually my lab was mostly solid state stuff (predominantly x-ray and thermo techniques), so I really meant it when I only said I knew *something* about aqueous chem. :oops:
Nice to see the dosing given in terms of mL and teaspoons — no access to the nice analytical scales anymore, and having a high precision scale “around the house” just doesn’t look good! :o
If I can keep picking your brain, what’s your favorite source of KNO3 and KH2PO4?
