Crabby

2 questions: What’s your go-to fish recommendation for a brand new aquarist? and What are your top tips for someone applying to work at an aquarium or pet store?

Yeah I was considering it could also be the food. I have a feeling I was feeding a decent amount of pumpkin before they spawned the 2 times, and I probably ran out shortly after. Parameters and treatment from other fish have been the same forever.

I tried this method after my failed first spawn where the fry were all eaten by apistos in my main aquarium. I had no survivors from the first spawn, but I got a second spawn soon after. This second spawn I decided to pull the fry before they left the cave. I ended up losing 90% of the fry through different causes (they went to different grow outs for maximum success) and I didn’t get another spawn afterwards. I wonder if that was because I pulled the fry?

While I’m not a super crazy breeder, I do breed fish regularly, and I’d say I’m a type C - I generally breed the fish that I breed in their display tanks. It’s always dependent on the fish, but I’ll almost always have fry going. I’ve only got 4 tanks right now, my largest being a planted 29g with 3 generations of Apistogramma Nijsseni (latest spawn was 2nd gen female with 1st gen male just the other day, so exciting and a little bit weird), but I have a lot of other fish in that tank. I’ve bred calico BNs in there too somewhat recently. All my other tanks are 5 gallons. I’ve got a spare that I bring out for breeding projects (all have failed at some stage so far 😢) such as when I tried my hand at betta breeding, or raising my CPD fry. Definitely gonna have another shot at those at some point though. Might need to set up tubs, cuz I’m pretty keen on using that extra 5 gallon for a bedroom notho killi tank, or maybe some wild Thai orchid guppies. I’ve also got goldfish breeding in my pond (totally unintentional), and plan on setting up a patio pond for breeding pseudomugil luminatus. It’s summer here in Australia. Hope that gives some insight into the methods of an amateur small-scale breeder who just does it for the fun of it.

I agree with this - depending on the amount of fry you want, just add or remove some hornwort. The more hornwort, the more fry that will survive. But the adults will essentially not allow the population to grow uncontrollably.

If I knew how to send one of those gifs like @mountaintoppufferkeeper does, I’d show you the little bloodworms squiggling around in the pools of my pond’s water feature.

So to my knowledge there isn’t a sure fire way to ‘culture’ bloodworms, but depending on where you live you can get them to naturally culture in your backyard. Bloodworms are the larvae of a type of midge, specifically those from the family chironomidae. They’re generally found in the Southern Hemisphere, but there may be some in the Northern Hemisphere too, I’m not sure. I live in Australia, but I assume you’re probably American. I’ve harvested them in buckets, tubs, and from my pond before (and even had them in my canister filter!) If they do live in your area, the trick is to fill a bucket or tub with nice aged water from your aquarium, then add a whole bunch of leaves to the bucket. Heaps. Cover the bottom with a couple layers. I’ve heard you can add banana peels too. Then just sit and wait. In a couple weeks you should have mosquito larvae up in the water column, and bloodworms in the leaves. Harvesting them is a little complicated but if you’re up for it then it’s definitely doable. Just move the leaves to one side and have a go at them with a pipette or a net. The fish LOVE them. You get them at a good size too. But it’s pretty dependent on where you live, because they need to complete their life cycle to breed and produce larvae. Hope that helps 🙂

@Theresa_M I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve had to deal with this. I’ve also had a massive die-off before, thankfully not in a display aquarium but it was heartbreaking nonetheless. I might share my story, if everyone else is sharing theirs 🙂 So in 2020 I was breeding a lot of endlers livebearers. I had a 5 gallon tank that was filled to the brim with plants, snails and endlers. I honestly think there were 50-100 endlers in there, ranging from fry to fully grown adults. They were breeding nonstop, and I loved it! I had a couple massive females in another tank that had been inseminated by a male a long time ago, and were still dropping monthly batches of ~40 fry, and those fry would go straight to a breeder box. I was selling decent sized groups really cheaply on a regular basis, and I think my largest order was 80 juvies, which was crazy, coming out of a 5 gallon and a breeder box. Considering this success with endlers, I jumped at the opportunity when a member of another forum I’m a part of put up the offer to send out a pair of Campoma Blue Star endlers to anyone who could identify which endlers from a group of images were true endlers (and hadn’t been crossed with guppies). I was the first to get it right, and was super stoked. I decided I wanted to put them in my endler tank with my shrimp, and move all the other endlers out. As much as I enjoyed the endlers I had, they were a mix - I had Japanese Blues, yellow cobras, and black bars, all of which are hybrid species with guppies. I wanted to start only keeping pure endlers, like the Blue Stars. In retrospect, I had a couple awesome male black bars with traits I hadn’t seen before, and I totally should’ve put them in a seperate aquarium to line breed, but that’s besides the point. I intended to sell off my remaining endlers and start working with other pure species like the Campoma Blue Stars. Before the Blue Stars arrived, I moved the endlers all into the other 5gal. Now, that was an effort. But it was worth it - the Campoma Blue Stars looked amazing in the planted 5 gal. The other endlers didn’t look so great in the bare bottom tank with a single massive Java fern and some Java moss, but it worked. For a week. Then I saw a couple bodies. I looked more carefully, and there were some endlers that were really skinny. I’d dealt with this before - a kind of flatworm that eats all the food the endler eats, to the point where the endler starves and dies. It’s very contagious and very deadly. Yay. Luckily I had meds on hand. I treated immediately, and decided it was all okay; they’d recovered from it before. I had a few more die, but this is to be expected, they were just too far gone when I started the meds. I still had 50 or so. It was fiiiiiiine. Not. The meds didn’t work. I don’t know why. The fish kept dying. A few every day. I would come home in the evening and catch out all the bodies. I kept treating them, and doing water changes, but nothing helped. Eventually the death rate was getting so high that the bodies were everywhere, and the tank was surely filled with ammonia. At that point it didn’t matter what I did, they were doomed. If I changed enough water to make it clean again, I would’ve shocked & stressed them. If I didn’t water change, they would have died from ammonia poisoning. I essentially had to sit back and watch them all die. It was truly heartbreaking. I’d raised every one of these fish, taken such good care of them, and this is how it ended. And it was surely my fault. So I know how you’re feeling. And I’m so sorry you’re feeling that way. And I hope you can learn from those mistakes, as I feel I’ve learnt from mine.

😲 Congrats! It’s so cool to hear you can do that. I would have thought it unlikely (considering the amount and kind of fish) but as you said, it’s so much better to be able to use a single tank to colony breed multiple species. I’m a big fan of that approach too (where possible).

Wow, congratulations @Vinm! That’s huge! Best of luck for the fry and this next batch!

Oh wow, how cute!! How big is it?

Best wishes Nick, hope you’re doing well. I bet the fish are missing you. Or not, perhaps… they might be thinking “thank goodness we get a break from having that camera stuck in our faces!”

Couldn’t help but smile while looking at these last few posts. It’s been so wonderful to watch them grow through your thread. There’s so much visible intelligence in these young fish, it’s incredible.

Oh how interesting! Just a sudden transition? And was it all of them?

Teach me your ways 😂

Well I wasn’t gonna say this, but now I can’t help it - this tank was actually in one of my dreams a couple nights ago! I was in a bit of a weird fish room with a couple fish-loving friends of mine (I’ve had a fair few dreams like this), and I remember someone saying something about @OnlyGenusCaps’s cyps, and the tank looked exactly like it does in the photos. It was pretty cool actually 😄

She’s doing a pretty good job at pretending then!

Many species of wild bettas have more subtle colouration. Of course, there are still some impressively colourful wild types. What a cool group of fish, right?! That’s so cool! What a great find. Haven’t heard of this before but I’m very interested to see how it goes.

Ooh cool experiment! I haven’t heard of this approach before. Following to see what happens.

I can usually sex endlers and guppies from 6-8 weeks using the start of the small gravid spots in females, but it’s iffy business. Colour develops around 10 weeks in my experience.

This is incredible! What a great execution of an idea that so many breeders have had. I hope you’re making a video from this for your YouTube? Can’t wait to see it if you do.

A newborn calico BN from my last batch:

Almost definately a cross between endlers and guppies. They don’t look anything like a pure endler line or a pure guppy line to me.

@mountaintoppufferkeeper How are these little guys going? And did you end up pulling fry from the cave?

Shrimp Update! Well, technically it isn't a shrimp update cuz it's the first time I'm properly talking about shrimp, but it's a journal update that also contains information about shrimp 😄 I've kept shrimp a couple times before, but it's never gone very well. I've attempted keeping both caridina (tangerine tigers) and neocaridina (blue dreams) and I've had some breeding, but I always ended up with a bit of a die-off. I believe I still have one blue dream left, although I haven't seen him in a couple days (eek!). After a very long time struggling to successfully keep shrimp, I think I worked it all out with my last 3 shrimp from my final attempts, who lived much longer lives than all their predecessors. So, with that in mind, when I saw some super cheap, beautiful crystal red shrimp pop up on gumtree near me, I couldn't resist. I bought 20 (got 2 extras for free), and split them between my CPD 'iwagumi' tank, and my fry tank. The fry tank unfortunately no longer contains fry, but I'm going to produce some over the next week with my newfound knowledge that regular water changes are necessary. Irritatingly, regular water changes are one thing I found to be bad for shrimp, so I'm going to have to make sure I match parameters with my water change water. I think I should be able to manage it, although I'm also going to drop down my production to 40 fish instead of the hoped 80, and do a small water change every second day. I'm confident that this will help, and so will the shrimp. I really adore these CRS, and I can't wait to start breeding the high grades together. I've got a couple SS that I'm just in love with. Anyways, all seems to be going well for now. The ones in the CPD tank hide a bit more, but they're more active when the lights are off, so I think that's a good reason for me to keep the lights off for most of the day and prevent algae growth from consuming the tank again. Also, our restrictions are lessening slightly over this weekend so I'll be able to go to the LFS again and pick up some more plants. Can't wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!