Surreal

Thanks for all the help @Lennie, your information has been invaluable when it comes to these guys! Quick update on my fish: I was able to find and scoop out 9 of the fry that I was able to see in the aquarium. My aquarium is very dense with plants (and hair algae), so I think it's safe to assume that there are still fry in there that I haven't seen yet. Whenever I pass by the tank I always try to see if there's a fry out and about, but they're honestly super hard to spot. Either way, the 9 that I caught have been placed in a fry tray by @Lowells Fish Lab. This is also my first time trying this tray and I honestly love it so far! I'll try to take some pics once I set things up more permanently. The first day the fry were in the tray, I just fed some crushed pellets since that was all I had on hand. The day after I fed BBS, and the day after my sera micron came in. So far, these fry seem to be doing okay! I've been feeding twice a day and plan on feeding BBS every other day. From my reading online, it seems like the mistake people make when raising whiptail fry is not feeding enough so hopefully I'm feeding these guys enough to grow and thrive. All nine seem to be doing okay, I'll leave any updates here! Just out of curiosity, how many fry do you guys get in a typical batch?

Thank you for the pictures! What do you feed your fry? I just put in some crushed pellet food I had on hand. Hopefully that's enough but it seems like whiptails are notoriously hard to raise from what I'm seeing online.

Oh wow, thank you for the warning. I was planning on letting them graze like you mentioned, but after what you said I'm going to try my best to scoop all of the fry out and put them in a fry tray. I have a 3D Printed one from Lowell's Fish Lab, hoping that will do the trick.

It took half a year, but I got some red lizard whiptail babies! I got these guys wanting to breed them right off the bat, but I didn't have much luck. I initially set up the aquarium with three of the whiptails as well as some forktail blue-eyes. I thought having these as dithers would make the whiptails more comfortable, but I guess the forktails were harassing them too much. I recently took out the forktails and placed them in my community tank, and about a month later I saw these little free swimmers roaming around the tank! They're still super small, maybe 5 or 6 mm in size, but there are more than I can count in the aquarium. I don't have another aquarium at the moment to rehome the adults, so hopefully these guys will be okay growing up with the adults. I guess that'll be the next part of my experiment. As far as care goes, I have the tank heavily planted on two sides with just sand and cholla wood in the middle. The tank they're in is super filtered with both an internal sump in the back as well as an Oase Biomaster canister filter. This tank was custom made and is about 20x24x12 inches (around 15 gallons). I specifically planted with plants that have broad leaves on them since I noticed these guys like to hop on the leaves and sway in the aquarium, kind of cute. Their diet is really varied and I don't really follow a set schedule for feeding except for brine shrimp every other day. On the days I don't have brine shrimp, I feed NLS pellets, XTreme Nano Pellets, Frozen Blood Worms, Freeze Dried Tubifex, Hikari Vibra Bites, Repashy Soilent Green, and Repashy Community Plus. Attached some photos to this post that I took with my Canon. These guys are still super small so it was hard to take decent pictures of them with all of the extension tubes I had to use, but hopefully they'll grow up and be easier to take pictures of soon.

The going rate at Casa Whiptail is 1 blackworm cube per night, make sure you leave a deposit! And yeah, I might make smaller versions of these if I see aggression happening but so far they all seem to tolerate/hang out with eachother in the aquarium.

Since this seems to be the official red lizard whiptail thread: I just wanted to show off this little hotel I 3D printed for them. From what I can tell these fish like the half inch PVC pipes that are 6 inches long, so I designed these tubes with slots that can be put into this little hotel. They can slide in and out easily individually, and I can just take all of the caves out at once if needed. I didn't put it in my aquarium yet since I'd still like to do a little post-processing on them a bit, and maybe glue some moss on the outside so it doesn't look like a black brick haha. Hopefully the little guys will like this though!

Wow, I absolutely love how open the aquarium community is with their information. Thank you so much! I'll definitely let you know if I have any more questions when it comes to these guys. I've only had them for about a week so far and absolutely love watching them! I am also going to get more plants for them since like you mentioned they really seem to prefer planted setups. Thank you again for all of the information! I really appreciate it.

@Lennie Don't mean to revive an old thread like this, but have you come to any more conclusions when it comes to these guys? I just picked up a few from my LFS and love them as well, want to make sure I give them the best care I can!

Looks awesome!! Super weird to see something I designed on someone else's table haha. I hope you like this better than the default stand!

Almost there!

Exciting!! Would love to see how it turns out in the end! Don’t think I’ve ever seen someone else print something I’ve designed so definitely curious how this turns out haha.

All up for debate really, I have a lot of hardscape, sand, potting soil, plants, etc. just laying around, but I'm not opposed to having a bare bottom tank for example if I'm breeding plecos. Thanks! Definitely would want to get some sort of really small fish that I can have a large school of if I go the planted route.

All up for debate really, I have a lot of hardscape, sand, potting soil, plants, etc. just laying around, but I'm not opposed to having a bare bottom tank for example if I'm breeding plecos. Thanks! Definitely would want to get some sort of really small fish that I can have a large school of if I go the planted route.

Hey all, I have this empty aquarium that I'm looking to get some stocking suggestions for. Right now I am leaning towards trying to breed some sort of pleco and celestial pearl danios in it as my first breeding project, but I am also considering just making this a planted pea puffer aquarium with ~6 pea puffers. Do any of y'all have any suggestions?

I have a 10 gallon aquarium I am wanting to turn into a black worm culture. So far my plan is to add a very thin layer of gravel on the bottom and throw in a seeded sponge filter. There are a few things I am a bit unsure about though. Should I use dechlorinated tap water or should I used aged aquarium water from a water change? Do black worms require a photo period or will they do fine with just the ambient light in the room? Any tips anyone may have would be greatly appreciated!

Good catch! Just fixed this. It was pretty late when I was finishing this up so I was expecting a few errors haha.

I made this into a little website for people! https://nermquiz.netlify.app/ Let me know if anyone has any suggestions or anything Also, my score was only 37.5😭

Hey everyone! The hate for the ziss brine shrimp hatchery stand is pretty universal, so I decided to design this 3d printable stand that I designed. Makes it way easier to turn the nozzle, it lifts the hatchery itself up a bit more, and it has a drip tray that you can print so you don't get your table dirty. If you're interested in printing this yourself, here's the link to the files.