L777
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Oh yeah. The other great thing about the moss is that even though it rests on the bottom, it takes it a long time to grow into the substrate, and you can pretty easily pull it apart from the gravel once it does. You can see I’ve got a pretty coarse gravel. Probably too coarse to be great for rooting planted plants. But the moss pushes aside pretty easily for a gravel vacuum to keep the bottom from sludging up. Then you just fluff it back into shape once the gravel is all cleaned up. Mine does grow fastest under intense light. This is about a 2 month growth under pretty normal fluorescent tank-light tube, starting from a clump maybe 1/4 as big as it is now. Every couple of months I “harvest” a mat of it from each of my tanks and trade it in at the lfs. Fish store credit — better currency than gold!
Best fishes to you. We’re all pulling for your next go at CPDs!
Before my fry were able to eat BBS (almost a week for the CPDs it seemed like), they ate loads of micro-organisms I couldn’t see in the water because they are too small. These populations of “infusoria” are kept high in the presence of live plants (shameless plug for the live plant cult).
I also fed them a powdered food made for raising fry. I used “OSI micro food” http://www.petsolutions.com/Micro-Food+I92700105+C100045.aspx although I think a bunch of companies make fine powders and granules — check the fish food shelves where you work. If you can find it, Liquifry #1 is a liquid suspension of super-tiny food bits for the fry.
I highly recommend micro-worms too. Culturing them is even easier than brine shrimp. Also less smelly if you are trying to keep the BBS bubbler going more than a few days on a single batch. Way less smelly if you make the mistake of letting the air stop in the BBS bubbler!!!!
I posted a link earlier to a great step-by-step recipe webpage about culturing micro-worms. $10 worth of supplies (plastic dish and lid, flaked dry baby cereal, brewer’s yeast, and active yeast) will keep you in wiggly live fish food for months — and get the adults fattened up for breeding. Once you have the supplies, all you need is a couple of bucks for a little dish of someone else’s culture, but these are easy to find at your local fish club, or at places like aquabid.com. Are there any other fish breeders at the place you work? They might have some live food cultures to get you started. I promise the micro-worms won’t stink up the folks’ house. There is a bit of a yeasty smell — like baking bread — but unless you keep the lid on tight for a couple of days without letting it breathe, you won’t get the foul smell that a bubbler full of BBS can bomb you with if it goes anaerobic.
Also, the cube tank is small enough that the adults might be spawning but then eating all the eggs. Do you have a second tank you could use to separate the adults once they spawn?
Hans,
welcome to the forum!CPD habitat in their native Myanmar mountains has water temps in the low 20s C, and many people have bred successfully at these temps. The 70-odd fry I’ve gotten were all spawned/hatched up near 27-27.5C (80-82F). I had planned to turn down the temp when I saw the other reports, but then the fry started to appear, so I didn’t change anything. One comment I read earlier (I think it is in this forum, but maybe it was from the original breeders in England?) suggested that at higher temps the adults’ metabolism is increased, which takes away from their energy for breeding and keeps them more constantly on the look out for food.
My adults all got in breeding condition on live microworms. I fed them at least twice a day, often 4-5 times a day or more (whenever I’d walk past the the tank). They welcome fresh-hatched brine shrimp, too. Before I started conditioning my adults, they did just fine on commercial small flakes and micro-granules, plus whatever they could pick at in the plants in the tank, but they never really did fatten up until I started feeding them live wigglers every day.
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:
More beautiful pictures!! Any update on the japo shrimp that made a quick appearance in one of your shots? It looks like an Amano. Is it? If so, are you able to raise the fry past the free-swimming stage, or do you just let them become fish food?
btw, I haven’t fed live bloodworms before. Sounds like you are speaking from the voice of experience about the fly bites.
Fighting BBA — so what are your “weapons” of choice?
Tank looks good to me. The chocolates were the first thing to catch my attention!
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. Sorry to hear about your losses, but think of all the experience and good judgment you can use toward their replacements!
My two cents: if your intentions are to breed these fishies (and they sure seem to be!), then I’d argue that the ethical thing to do is to buy some of the wild-caught fish that are still floating around in the market. This will add greater diversity to the captive-bred populations. The downside is potentially adding pressure to the wild populations because buying stimulates capturing. However, Myanmar is said to have officially removed these guys from their positive list of what *can* be exported (which is actually a better way to do it than to have a potentially incomplete list of what can’t be exported). So the connection between buying them from stores and adding pressure to wild collecting should be broken, black markets and illegal activity aside.
Keep in mind you’ll have to find a way to get the adults away from the kids as soon as they spawn, especially if the eggs/fry only have plastic plants to hide in.
Looking forward to hearing about your first spawns! We know it won’t be long!
And the answer is:……..
Praecox!! (Surprise to few). Out of the eight or so that hatched out, half survived (I blame the blasted hydra :twisted: ). One got bigger right out of the chute, and a couple of days ago ate the smallest
. The biggest was big enough to join the 4-week old shoal of CPD young, so he’s in with them in the bushy-nose pleco factory, and the two remaining tiny ones just went into my daughter’s one-gallon for a couple weeks until they can hold their own in the grow-out tanks.Congrats to all for their accurate ID guesses.
On the other hand, cramped in a 5gal might be better than starving in a huge tank! Mine move around a lot, but don’t seem to move very *far* in my moss-choked 10 gallon tank. Personally, I’d give the 2.5 gal a go until a more ideal size is available.
Keep us posted.
Atlantis,
I’m terribly sorry to hear about your losses.If you know anyone from your area who will be making a trip as far south and east as Minneapolis, let me know — I can send a bunch of my captive-breds back with them for you. Not sure about what’s involved with the border crossing, though.
Best wishes to you in finding your next CPDs.
aquaholic,
when I kept cichlids (mostly mbuna types), it seemed like I could never get the tank past the brown algae stage. I changed the water at least 80% weekly (usually more), and didn’t overfeed. Having cichlids meant no plants (they’d tear them out or tear them up) to soak up the organics and such. I’ve noticed a lot of other people’s cichlid tanks end up brown-coated as well. BN plecos helped a bit. I think the high pH hard water (my tap at the time was naturally suited to Africans without further conditioning) contributed to the problem. The tank was a 55 gallon with piled slate and cleaned field rock, some gravel on the bottom for the fish to dig around in, and a pair of large power filters hanging on the back.Have you encountered this also? Is there a good solution that doesn’t involve expensive revolving use of disposable sorbent media?
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My demasoni experience matches your advice — I had two plus a half dozen salousi’s, the first male salousi to get bigger than the rest beat them all up, especially the salousi’s that tried to turn blue.
