tolstoy21

My experience has been the following: Leave the female with the fry in the tank they were spawned in. Why? Because if you watch the female, you'll notice how much active care goes into her rearing her children--bringing them to food, or bringing food to them, herding them by sucking them into her mouth and spitting them back into the pack with their siblings, and possibly just keeping them clean from fungus and other things (my speculation). I believe she will also tend to the eggs to make sure they don't fungus over (felt like I watched this in a video with Kasia from Creative Pet Keeping). All in all, she'll do a much better job than us mere humans. Remove the male. It's hit or miss with the dads. I've seen first-time dad's gobble up their kids, and first time dads also leave their kids be. Recently, due to lack of tank space, I've left the males in, and in two cases with apisto cacs, the first-time dads devoured their kids. But one particular dad, who now has had a second chance at this, seems to have gotten the hang of it. My apisto agassizzi dad just started devouring his kids (a snack that his other 'woman friend' also joined in on!). I got most of the fry out in time and into a breeder box. However, 50% of the fry I'm playing mother to haven't made it. I'm lucky if I have a half dozen at the end of this. On the other hand, I have another pair (apisto beanschi) in which the first-time dad is doing great! As soon as I have another rack set up (working on it currently), I'll go back to always removing the male and letting the female raise her own children without my intervention. In the past, I've gotten huge spawns this way that have all made it to adult hood. Oh and also, the female can get quite vicious with the dad, and you could lose him. On the other hand, with time and luck, and some lost spawns, mom and dad should be able to learn how to co-parent without resorting to spousal abuse or pedo-cannibalization. I've probably spawned apistos a dozen or so times, so I'm by no means a master, but this has been my take away observing their behavior as parents (and my success--or lack thereof-- as a surrogate) in the past few years.

I sell on aquabid a lot and use PayPal invoicing linked to a PayPal business account so that the buyers have some confidence in terms of protections for their purchases and a place to go for dispute resolution. Obviously every seller is different, but this is where reading seller reviews comes in handy. Before buying, just contact a seller who has something you’re interested in, inquire about their shipping practices, prices and options, and what their policy looks like should you be dissatisfied with your purchase. Then gage your confidence based on that. You can get a good feeling about a transaction before hand by having a basic email conversation with a seller and seeing how responsive they are, and how willing they are to accommodate a customer’s reasonable requests or concerns. I’ve used aquabid quite a bit over the past two years with all good experiences as both a buyer and seller. In my experience, the sellers with a decent history of good reviews under their belts are a decent group of people.

The males will take on more grey/brown tones in the body. Males also tend to have blue in them, noticeable at various times, like in your picture above. The females can be 'muddy' looking at times, but they're also more yellow over all, and get bright yellow when they are ready to spawn or have fry near. As for fins, the males will have a very pronounced 'lyre-shaped' tail, whereas the female may have teeny tiny spikes where the males tail spikes are elongated. The ventral fins of the male will take on a more 'flame' pattern. This can also be seen in females, but (in my experience at least) they will have much more pronounced and solid black coloration in their ventral fins, and less of the fancy flame patterning. The first spine on the dorsal fin of the male will be much more pronounced and elongated than in the females. Of course, like I said in my other response. Those fin shapes and colors can be suppressed in sub-dominant males, and males can take on female coloration and looks when in the presence of other more dominant males.

It is possible the one on the right is a male and will develop more typical male finnage and coloration over time. However, I'm going with female. I've bred a lot of females that look just like the picture on the right. For instance, compare yours to the one below (the dead giveaway below isn't color or finnage, but all her wee little babies!) I've also had fish I thought were female that looked like yours and later turned out to be subdominant 'sneaker' males, and didn't develop fully until separated out from the other more dominant males. But this doesn't happen a ton. If you do have a female and she breeds with that male, you'll have some very nice looking offspring. You'll just have to wait and see what happens. Adding two more females in a 40 gallon should not be an issue. At least not until they spawn, then you'll just have to gage the aggression level of the new mother against the others.

I typically remove the male for 2 reasons 1) If he's a new parent, he could potentially snack on his kids 2) The female can beat the heck out of him (I had one rip off half the male's tail fin!). That being said, I have a male and female in a tank with fry currently (lack of tank space to relocate the male) and have my fingers crossed. Every pair is different. And they get better at fry raising over time. However, I almost never chance it. I'll typically pull the male the moment I believe the female has fry in the cave.

This is what I run --> APC Backup UPS APC is a well known UPS manufacturer.

I run a UPS on my 125 gallon. A good UPS will also protect against any power surges. I don't get a great runtime out of it, maybe 10-15 minutes, but it keeps things running smoothly when there is a power-blip. I think I paid less than $100 for mine at staples or best buy. It would probably run a modest HOB and LED for 30 minutes+ easily. Heaters will drain it much quicker.

@Hobbit I think I have maybe 20? It's a moving target but always going up! Also update on this setup . . . . Man my water depletes the cartridges fast! This is also why I double-stacked the de-nitrate filters. I'd hate to also have to double stack these, but alas it may be the case. All of this is to avoid going the RO route. I do also have an RO unit that I use for caridina shrimp, but running that for change water for a lot of tanks is much more expensive and less 'automatable' than this setup (well I haven't had to try to automate that more fully yet). I'll probably continue to tweak this until I get the water chemistry I'm looking for, or someone sends me to the fish-keeping looney bin -- whichever happens first!

@gjcarew You might also want to shop around for pond/waterfall pumps. These have a good deal of power and head pressure. Yeah, this was the problem with the first sump pump I used. Not oil free and I could smell it in my water.

@gjcarew I have setup exactly what you're describing and do water changes on a 125g gallon like this. Setup has been in place for years now, works very well. What you need to do is look at the head pressure specifications for various pumps. Utility sumps are very powerful and up to the task, but after running one for about a month, my water began to take on an odd fuel oil smell, so I switched to a regular aquarium pump. When you calculate head pressure, make sure to accommodate for any elbows or bends in your plumbing. A lot of reef/saltwater sites have good information on how to calculate various flow rates given the amount of T's or elbows in your plumbing. Just like you, I use a smart plug to trigger a water change from my phone and can change up to 40 gallons in a few minutes.

Cause I'm anal and get fixated on the little things, I rigged up the below to dial in the water hardness to my aquariums (to both my breeding setup and display tanks -- all are on AWC). In the below I plumbed in a water softener cartridge with a bypass + gate valve. The gate valve allows me dial in the amount of 'hard' water that bypasses the filter. Since installing this, my water went from around 250ppm hardness to somewhere in the range of 50ppm according to the COOP test strips. Going to test with API drop kit as soon as I get one just to have a couple different reads, then I may tweak the hardness a bit. Why am I doing this? Well aside from being crazy and liking to tinker with things, my well water has a kind of funky makeup. Kh hovers just above 0, GH is around 250ppm-ish, and nitrates are 40ppm. I keep pretty much all soft-water species (tetras, apistos, etc) so I wanted to tinker with lowering their GH. The recharge port shown on the right-hand side of the picture allows me to manually recharge all the resin with a brine wash, so I don't have to continually replace any of the filters which would be more of an expense than I'd ever want to incur long-term. This basically allows me to do a semi-automated regen-cycle. I've been running de-nitrate filters a few years now, so the GH filter is a new addition to an existing, working system.

I'm like-minded on this one, or I clean them as infrequently as I can. The problem I encounter is that the fry always seem waaaaaay to inquisitive and want to go into the gravel vac and I have a hell of a time dissuading them form doing so. So, typically, I don't start cleaning until they are older and wiser, or if the tank looks like its in peril from too much organics. To compensate for this, I do massive amounts of water changes on these tanks via a automated drip system so they they always have stable, fresh, clean water. I have yet to encounter any deaths or illnesses as a result of these methods. Well there is one exception to the rule -- Odessa Barbs. I clean those fry thanks a lot as they are very susceptible to poor water quality issues in the first two months.

In my experience, a fish that is bloated that bad is usually not long for this world. The bloat is usually the result of some other, unseen underlying illness. It's still worth trying to save, but I would separate it from the others if you can. If it dies and drifts somewhere unseen the other fish could feast on it and possibly contract the underlying illness themselves.

Most of the shrimplets should jump off as you lift the sponge out of the water. One or two might hang on, but if you put the sponge in a bucket of similar water and let the detritus settle, you should be able to net the baby shrimp out and transfer them back to the tank. Sure, there could still be an accidental loss in this whole process. But my guess is if you're seeing babies now, there will more than likely always be babies in there from this point forward. So clean your filter and shoo off and/or rescue as many as you can.

I just pair them off in pairs. I'll have one-to-three pairs in their own breeding setup at any given time. With 130 fish in a 20 long, you will see variable growth rates. This is to be expected. If you separate out the smaller fish to different tank, they will be able to put some size on without the competition of the larger, more dominant fish. You might also think about splitting the batch up so it doesn't get overcrowded as the fry grow, and so in case something were to happen (illness, heater breaking, water params going out of whack), you don't lose them all in one shot. As for aggression, I tend to not see it until there are far fewer fish, and the tank is set up in a way that they can start creating territories and/or start trying to spawn. I've had as few as 20 males in a 29G with little in the way of decoration (just one piece of drift wood), and they barely sparred. Sure they might nip each other but they wont get as brutal as they would if it were two males competing for breeding territory. In comparison, I have a well-planted 125 gallon tank with a single male. If I introduce a second, he hunts it down and kills it. I start offering my apistos for sale around the three-month point. I'll sell off the larger, more dominant fish first. Hope this helps.

@PhirefaseI find that coloration and patterning in the body can be variable in A Cacs. depending on mood, stress, where they are in the pecking order (meaning a dominant male or submissive male), if they are in breeding mode, etc. However, at this point you should be able to confidently select a few nicely colored dominant males from a grow out easily, but others may color up in response to their removal and assume a dominant role. However, by 6 months, fin pattern and fin coloration should be pretty set, so if you were going to cull based on that, you should be fine at this point. If you have a lot of fish in a grow out still, you'll notice that when you separate some out and put them in their own tanks, they will take on size faster, and this is where you get a second-opinion perspective on what they look like from a body patterning perspective. I've seen pretty drab females with dark bellies turn a splendid yellow, orange and black, with very nicely defined patterns and lines when separated out from the rest of the fish and conditioned for breeding. These days, I tend to cull more based on body shape than patterning, unless I have fish with a n obvious poor stripe, etc. As for fins, if I have some fish that don't display the full coloration I want in their pectorals, I'll trade these into the LFS for credit.

So you do have a personal development team after all. Awesome!

Unless the app had some kind of AI to take a picture of the fish and automatically tell you the male-to-female ratio, or count the clutch size, or any other feature that would automate gathering the the data points that are important to you, I would imagine using an app would be about the same amount of time/work as using a well-designed spreadsheet. It would all be data entry in the end. The advantage I can see with an app would be that the form factor of a phone or tablet beats a computer or laptop for field use. However, a spreadsheet allows you the ultimate flexibility in terms of recording the data points you want to record, not what the app developer decided you'd like. Unless, of course, you have your own development team on staff. Then in that case, let's build this thing!

I use a drip system for many of my tanks. This changes anywhere from 2-4 gallons an hour on 20 highs (and a few 40 breeders) 2x daily. I guess I probably change 25% - 40% volume daily, depending on the tank. The fresh water going in is about 50-55F in the winter, a tad warmer in the summer. Water goes in slowly, spaced over many short intervals. Over all, the temps will only fluctuate 3-5F during the course of the day. I've been doing this a few years now and have not seen any adverse effects on any fish species I keep. I keep all my tanks at between 74F and 82F.

Yeah, I would agree that moderate differences in temp don't matter tremendously. I've even become pretty brazen with my crystal red shrimp these days to, as I will move them from one tank to the next, or do a water change, and as long as I'm not like 10F off in temps, I just don't worry about it anymore. I'll do a 30% water change on them with water that maybe 5F off and the temps stay pretty solid. I tend to treat Ph the same as long as I'm within 0.5 degrees or so. But this can be species dependent, as I killed a bag full of L397 pelcos by moving them from one Ph to another too quickly--death by plop-and-drop! 😞 Worst day ever! On second thought, given the above, maybe it's safer to ignore everything i just said! 😛

Make sure to add fish. 😜

@DAWGMANYeah I stopped trying to cut them with utility knives and now use a fine toothed blade on a table saw. Makes much cleaner, nicer cuts. @Tanked I ordered mine from Home Depot as 'local pickup' items.

And if not an auto-water change system, try to have nearby access to a water supply and drainage, close enough that you can use a python easily. If those aren't doable, then how much that matters really depends on how many tanks you have, the bio-load in them, and how much you enjoy changing water. If your room is mostly a place for planted display tanks, then an auto change system is more a convenience. If you plan to have a ton of packed grow out tanks for fry, then it starts leaning more toward becoming a necessity.

I also use a fine filter sponge like the one @Fish Folk posted.

I'll echo the 20% - 30% retail for store credit. That's been my experience with the few times I've traded in fish I've bred.