tolstoy21

That's normal. It's only a problem when you're ordering fish for tanks you don't have yet.

The cure for MTS is to go out and buy a bunch of tanks, a ridiculous amount, like a bunch of 20 highs during the dollar-a-gallon sale. Then get exhausted setting them up, spending all your money on substrate/plants/heaters/filters/etc., then spend even more money on fish, totally overstock them, then get exhausted by all the upkeep until the moment that fatigue and grief sets in and you just let them all gunk up and just look terrible. At that point reality will set in. You've massively overdosed; you've hit rock bottom. Don't worry there will soon be support groups to join, followed, of course, by a number of necessary relapses.

I sold them for a few years and found sexing them to be very difficult. I would assume a male was a larger specimen, but as for anything smaller than the largest fish, I really could not determine if they were younger males or mature females. You could always message someone listing them on AB and ask if they can send females and see what they say. That's probably worth a shot. If not, then I'd just get 6 - 12 fish. This will increase your odds. As for ramshorns, I was overrun with them too at one point and wondered the same thing, if the were eating eggs. Drop a zucchini slice in the tank on a fork and leave it in there over night. In the morning, lift it out and scrape off all the ramshorns. Rinse, repeat until you have them under control.

Agassizii Super Red, or Super Fire Red, by the looks of them.

Yeah I guess time will tell. But, I would focus on the fins. If they both exhibit elongated fins in an identical manner, and are roughly the same size, then they are the same sex. Coloration can vary to a degree, but fin shape/length and overall size difference should be key indicators.

Agreed. The finnage and coloration says male to me, but . . . . yeah I'd expect them tussle over territory. How large is your aquarium? I have found that when I grow out a large number of fish together they are pretty peaceful with one another because the idea of claiming territory is meaningless. Not sure if two semi-grown males in a similar circumstance, without the presence of females would result in the same. On the other hand, I've had a particular A Cacs. male that would kill any other male I put in a 125 gallon.

Based on your first pic, these fish appear similar in size. By 8 months, the male should be noticeably larger than the female. I also have Agassizii double reds, and the male is noticeably larger than his mate. It's similar with Cacatoudies as well, in my experience. I'm voting male for the fish in that pic based on my notes in my above post. But . . . . . I could be wrong! Like I said, would not consider myself to have mastered sexing this variant by any degree as of yet.

Yeah, if they are both males, I would imagine some aggression. I've had success breeding these fish in pairs. I only breed them as pairs, and not in harems, because the tanks I have aren't conducive to harem breeding, and when one female spawns, the other gobbles down her fry pretty fast. I'm leaning towards male with this pic.

Ok, so adding to my prior post . . . . based on coloration, I'm leaning towards two males. But as @anewie said, the pics are hard to see, but the top (left) fish appears to have much a more elongated dorsal than I see in my females. Hard to see in the bottom (right) fish. But I would say if their dorsal and anal fins are getting close to being as long as their tail, then you might have 2 males.

I wont to claim to be an expert at sexing super reds (especially younger fish), but I can share some pics of a male / female pair I have at the moment (I have another female and she looks exactly like the female the pics below). The key differences I notice between my male and females are as follows: The male is maybe larger than the females. If I were to guesstimate, I'd say its larger by maybe 30-40%. The male is the only one I have to exhibit the purple coloration along the base of the dorsal. The males tail is much more vibrantly colored. The dorsal and anal fins in the males are much more exaggerated (as is typical many apisto species). Again, this is just what I've observed in I'm my current trio. I have some fry growing out, but I just haven't spent enough time to feel confident I've mastered sexing agassizi variant. Ok now for some pics (taken moments ago).

Yeah, that's probably plenty. What is the Ph/Gh of the water? Mine would not breed for me until I got the water about 8+ Ph. The also prefer the water to be hard and on the warm side (78F and 82F). I also noticed that they are not prolific breeders, with some females taking long breaks between spawns. However, once the colony reaches a certain population, there are enough females around that at least one is producing fry at any given time. My batches of fry were also small, but after some time, they just start accumulating. My experience with them is the same as breeding shrimp. You start with a few, they take forever to increase their numbers, then, all of a sudden, you're overrun! I stopped breeding my mutils and sold the last of the colony about a year ago and I kind of miss them. Such a cool fish.

How may shells do you have? When I had multis I put in a huge number of shells. The spaces and gaps between the shells created many hiding places for fry to lurk and be safe.

@Cheryl P. Unfortunately, sometimes, experience is the best teacher. I make similar mistakes the first time I try something new. Never fun, but if they spawned once for you, chances are you'll get many more chances to perfect things.

Welcome! Nice looking aquarium! My wife would be jealous. She loves neon tetras. I see you got the old white fuzz on newly submerged wood thing going on. I get the same thing every time I put a new piece of wood into an aquarium. 🙂

I originally used Instant Ocean, but the frequency with which i hatch I wanted to reduce my costs a tad, so I experimented with solar salt. I haven't noticed a significant decrease in hatch rate, but I have had to play around with the amount I put in. Right now, approximately 4 TBS of solar salt and a tsp of baking soda seems to do a pretty good job (this is based on the full volume of the Ziss Artemia Blender). I wont speculate on which kind of salt is better (I'd probably wager marine salt is better in the end, used in the method Cory uses it -- in a whole environment kind of approach). But for cost efficiency you can't beat solar salt. (I'd just advise people find one that has no additives if they go this route). I do rinse my brine when feeding from a pitcher because I don't want to influence the params of my tanks with added KH (I breed mostly soft water species). But I do squirt some pipettes of salt water + brine into fry tanks every AM, and have never had problems that I've observed. I've used Diamond Crystal Solar Naturals for a few years now without issues. It's very widely available in most big box hardware stores, which makes it convenient. I don't want to turn this into a this is better than that thread, but just wanted to share information on one of the salts available that is widely available everywhere, that people can use without issue (in my personal experience), and that is pretty darn economical.

I use solar salt as well. I scoop it right out of the softerner's salt bin.

@fishinacage I got a trio of Trifaciata only to later find out one of the females was a male. Before that however, one of the males killed the true female, and then I noticed that the other 'female' and the male were fighting a lot so I separated them. Shortly after that, the fish that I assumed was a female colored up into a very nice looking male. So now I got two males, and no females. 😞 So . . . . . . these things do happen. If it happens to you, just know, you're in good company!

It can, but you also want to use very soft water with negligible GH and KH to amplify its effect. Peat works much better at really driving the Ph down if you have little or no KH in you water. You can really drive it well below 6 this way. So if you can, start with rain water, or RO water, unless you have naturally soft, acidic water. I keep Zebra Acara in RO water with peat pellets in a box filter and the Ph is so low I can't measure it with standard strips or test kits.

Hard to say. I don't have a lot of experience with this specific species. Based on the pictures, I'm going to say their coloration and patterning is probably variable depending on mood, lighting, time of day, etc etc. And this makes it hard to identify. I'd lean towards male with A. But with B, not really sure. I guess you'll find out if B takes on breeding coloration, which in this species I'm going to guess results in the black masking the females get. Baenschi are the similar. The breeding vs non-breeding female can exhibit widely different patterning and coloration. How old are these fish? Are they similarly sized?

😉

@RyanM I'm going to guess, and I emphasize 'guess', that light sensitivity is highly dependent on the specific tetra species. But I honestly only breed one type, so it's all i have experience with tetras thus far. If you're into tinkering, do a batch without light, one with subdued lighting, and then one with normal light and observe the results. This way you'll know and can cut out an extraneous step in the future. I personally like to run experiments so I have a good handle on things. Probably an artifact of my IT engineering/development background. I hate not understanding what affects outcomes with certainty and then operationalizing superfluous steps. But that's just me. Not sure if that's a personality feature or bug!

I feed both, but I have no idea if they are eating the vinegar eels or not.

Bulk Reef Supply sells some good kits. Another good option is AquaFX.

@RyanM I'm specifically breeding Kerri Tetras, and you know, I really just don't know yet what their light sensitivity is. I've bred quite a few batches of these fish thus far. However, the parents deposit the eggs into a very heavy layer of live sphagnum moss. I don't turn off or even dim the lights. But I'm not sure what the light penetration is into the moss layer. I'm going to say that they are not light-sensitive, but I just don't know for sure.

Right. And if the gene isn't in there lurking around as a recessive trait, you're waiting for a mutation that's advantageous to what your looking for and then separate that one specimen out for selective breeding.