zzyzx
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I have all kinds of plants in my tank:
I have some floating plants with long feathery roots which I bought so that fry would have somewhere to hide from their parents. This was unnecessary because I’ve never seen the parents chase the fry, and even when the parents do get near the fry, the fry don’t actually use the plant to hide in – unlike their parents, the fry don’t want to stick too close to plants.
I have some tall leafy plants that I thought the fry might use, again to hide in. Again, they don’t seem to try to “stick close” to the plants and I think this was unnecessary.
I have a low bushy plant. The adults LOVE this because they hide behind it and I never see them except at feeding time. I think that -anything- you put in the tank that they can hide behind is probably something the adults will like (bogwood, plant vase, etc.). As far as I know, it probably doesn’t actually help breeding except that fish that can hide might be less stressed and breed better.
On the surface, I have both a kind of grass I bought in a wire mesh from my LFS, as well as lots of Java Moss. The adults have a definite preference for spawning over the Java Moss, and I’ve rarely seen then spawn over the grass.
My recommendations for an ideal tank therefore would be: lots of java moss, and maybe one taller plant, or large object for the adults to hide behind.
Ste: In answer to your YouTube comment (won’t let me reply for some reason), yes, I’m getting fry from these fish. I have 1 male, 5 females, and get about 1 new fry a day.
My CPD’s did the mating dance for about 2-3 weeks before they actually started to spawn. Give them time.
For what it’s worth, now that mine have -started- to spawn, they seem to be spawning more or less every day now. Mine seem to be most active about 30 minutes after the hood light comes on in the morning, just before feeding time.
I have LOTS of fry now, and I only ever notice them when they are at the top of the tank, and I suspect they swim to the top fairly soon after hatching. (Which is why some of the posts about syphoning water off the top make me nervous.)
The fry swim about at the top of the tank, and don’t seem to be too bothered about swimming in the roots of some floating plants I have. They seem to be very brave and don’t need to hide from their parents as they parents always stay on the bottom of the tank, and don’t seem to be remotely interested in eating their young.
The older fry that are bigger are now about 2 months old, and they now spend some time down lower with their parents, as they are now too big to be accidentally eaten.
I’m also noticing that the males get a paler, gold stripe running down the top of their spine when spawning. (I think that rather than their spine turning gold, it’s just that the stripe becomes more noticeable because their sides turn blacker.)
Liquifry is a thick white liquid that comes in a dropper-bottle. From reading the labels/bottles, it contains dextrin, pea flour, whole egg, and yeast.
I found that if I hold the bottle just a mm or two above the water line when creating the drops, the drops will momentarily stay at the surface, and then once the surface tension has been broken, diffuse into millions of small little drops which spread around the tank. If you drop it from a height, the liquifry stays as a single drop which sinks to the bottom of the tank and tends to stay there for a while. I suspect the former approach is better. The tank water goes cloudy for a few hours as the nutrients go all over the tank.
The fry at first are FAR too small to observe whether or not they’re actually eating these droplets, but I guess they are.
The other thing that the label claims is that these nutrients will cause other microbes to grow (called “infusoria”), which the baby fish also eat. (Again, you can’t observe it because, well, they’re microscopic!). I -have- noticed that a few weeks after using Nutrifry, I now see (in the mornings when I first switch on the lamp), tiny little white worms crawling over the glass of the tank. I believe these are planaria, which again, the fish are supposed to like eating. Apparently planaria exist pretty much wherever you have fish and you probably already have some in your tank. The liquifry helps them multiply, and then become fish-food.
The label suggests that you should start putting liqui-fry into your tank BEFORE you have fry (as soon as you see eggs, it says, but with the CPD’s, you’re probably NOT going to see eggs). This is presumably so that the microbes are already thriving by the time the fry need them. I didn’t do that, but I suspect that if you see your fish making “spawning dances”, then a little liquifry might not hurt anything and get the tank ready for when you DO have fry.
Katkin – try the Practical Fishkeeping site. I think somewhere they have a list of pH readings submitted by their readers around the UK.
In my tank I put:
Liquifry for the babies…
For the adults (and the larger babies, I rotate between)
Frozen baby brine shrimp
Crushed tetraflake
Hikari micropellets.My fry are -definitely- eating -something- because they’re noticeably growing in size, so something about this food pattern is working.
From what I’ve observed, my own CPDs (I had 5 females and 1 male) weren’t ready to breed when I first put them in my tank.
Once they had a place of their own, they physically changed in two ways – they got plumper (presumably getting a greater share of the food as they were previously in a community tank, and also I started using frozen brine shrimp which I hadn’t used in the comm tank), and they also turned much darker.
They spent the first two weeks cowering behind a large plant and I rarely saw them. When they started darting around the tank chasing each other, it wasn’t really a “spawning” type chase, as the females were chasing each other around too, and I saw different fish doing the “curved body” dance with each other, but not really in any sort of pattern. (Perhaps they were practicing).
The spawning chasing seems different to me than the “preliminaries”. It’s actually less “all over the tank” and seems more focused to a particular area. I think this is because it takes them a little while to work out where they actually want to drop their eggs. Once my male worked out that he wanted to spawn over a particular clump of java moss, he tended to only stay around there when “chasing”, and would wait until females would come by there and shake their tail, which seems to be a signal that they’re willing to spawn.
I would be VERY curious to find out when most of your fish engage in spawning, as my fish seem to have a definite preference for doing so about 30 minutes after I first switch on the hood light in the morning, and I don’t see it at any time other than the early morning.
It seems that after I give them their first feed in the morning, they stop spawning and go back to hiding behind their plant.
At some point, it would be very interesting if we could arrange an experiment to see if leaving the fry in the tank with the parents results in lower fry survival rates than moving them out.
I’ve never seen the adults go after my fry (although I don’t spend ALL my time watching them), and I’m beginning to wonder if we know for sure whether or not they eat their own young. A side-by-side experiment where we had two tanks with similar numbers of breeding adults in each, would allow us to remove the fry from one tank, and leave the fry in the other, and see which method results in higher fry production.
(I know that many other species eat their own fry, but that doesn’t mean that -this- species necessarily does as well).
Of course, someone could come on here and say that they’ve actually -observed- the adults eating fry and then I’d say we all need to get fry tanks. :lol:
I’ve got the same problem in my breeding tank. Have tried using a chemical “anti-hair algae” for the last 3 weeks (from Interpet) but it doesnt’ seem to be doing anything, and I’m having to go in and remove the worst of it with my fingers, plucking it off my other live plants.
My local tap water is naturally high in nitrates, so I’ve been adding a nitrogen-reducing chemical (NitrateMinus from Tetra), which does seem to be lowering the nitrate levels in the tank to near zero, but I still get the algae quite badly.
I went the shrimp route thinking this might work, but I noticed that the steady growth in numbers of fry I’d had up until I added them had levelled off (and for a few days thought my fry numbers was decreasing), so I was worried that the shrimp might have been eating the fry/eggs and moved them to another tank (and my fry numbers are again increasing, which lends support to the idea that the shrimp may eat CPD eggs/fry.)
I know it takes all the fun out of having them, but I’ve found that my CPD’s -prefer- to hide, and if you give them more plant cover, they seem to be happier, and I suspect may breed more. Tall plants in the front of the tank give them more room to swim in without feeling “threatened” (although they also make it harder to see what they’re up to).
Before I had the breeding tank, my CPD’s were in a tank with a bunch of White Cloud Minnows, some x-ray tetras and 2 gouramis. In this situation, they were always taking food directly from the top, but this is probably because they wouldn’t get any food if they didn’t join the feeding-frenzy at the surface.
I’d hypothesize that without any other species in the tank they prefer to play it safe and avoid the surface, but if they’re not alone, they’ll go up to the top?
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…
