mountaintoppufferkeeper

Late to this party but I say a gas pocket that could not permeate through the nylon is the only thing I can think of that would cause that lift. Do you expect the anoxic layer would be limited to below the nylon as a result of it holding that air bubble below the clay and gravel?

I have also had that happen where a spawn vanished. If it helps my group of palustris the breeding male had a small spawn, then ate the eggs that were infertile a few times (one was the whole spawn), then had a bigger viable spawn that next month; I have never seen infertile eggs last any time at all in the cave with him. Based on my observations with my Pao, I do not believe they will eat them for hunger. Ambush puffers like the P.bailey can likely go a very long time without feeding in the wild. I think egg eating is more for spawn maintenance to keep the viable eggs going. If there are none left it may have been that none were fertile eggs.

Id agree on the Hairy especially. My 3 are all pretty relaxed with each other and cooperatively hunt when that opportunity arises.

Mine really fired up with live foods its one of my go to adjustments for anything not yet settled

Personally my albimarginata have spawned in a calvus cave on its side a few times. Bottom section is an egg transfer. I think good food and stable water is the key for me. I do not chase "perfect" water at the risk of stable water and pretty much everyone gets happy enough to breed for me. **my disclaimer have not produced fry possibly due to the pandas they hunt worms flakes and everything else they find in my tanks ** Mine do enjoy live blackworms quite a bit if an option I'd try live blackworms, live baby brine, and or live daphnia to get them fired up. The hunt helps in my systems. Their set up: Overflow sump 18x26x15 tank 2 female & 4 male albimarginata , with panda loach colony Temperature: 74°F Nitrate: 20 Nitrite: 0 GH: 300 KH: 30 pH: 7.0 Foods: live blackworms,daphnia, and brine shrimp. Live whiteworms ( recently added) Repashy occasionally and extreme flakes both krill and spirulina varieties

Day 60... "technically" Two months old 🤯 First day of smaller version of adult puffer food : young nightcrawlers. Will skip sharing that video but here are some of the puffers from today. 5 of 12 of the puffer pack Male. The darker pattern above, belly pattern, and semi regular "chippy" attitude make me almost certain this is one of a few males from this batch. nightcrawlers cultured by feeding whole wheat bread with yogurt and nutritional yeast, zucchini, greens, etc. The worms have become a staple of the adults of my adult puffers now.

Looking great @Vinm. I have yet to overfeed puffer fry its impressive what they can put away. The palustris do seem to eat bigger foods earlier than I thought they would. It will be fun to compare them with your hairys

They are so cool great job

.......And repeat: Adult male displaying for female in his cave. The inflation and color reversal is pretty awesome to see.

Thats a good deal there. I haven't yet got that change of color. Great stuff. Do you plan on changing anything with when you pull the eggs from the main tank on the next batch?

Normal my experience with the palustris. I do not believe my Pao fry eat by mouth before the yolk sack is absorbed. That mulm and your plants should also give you a bit of a safety net of things they can pick at once hungry. The Pao seem to take a few days to absorb that yolk sack. To my eye it looks like yours are around this growth which was day one after hatching for the palustris I wait until they are no longer look like a ball with eyes and are free swimming which is fairly quick. This is day 2 with free swimming next to a hard airline tube. They took vinegar eels once the yolk sac was gone. Day 3 live fresh hatched baby brine started with mostly vinegar eels or similar sized foods. In this that squiggly line is a vinegar eel After that is an amazing ride of fast growth. I believe my feeding has averaged to or is projected* to be: vinegar eels day 2-16 baby brine day 3-24 Whiteworms day 21-65* Cherry shrimp day 45-? Earthworms day 60*-? There is a good variation in growth rates, at least for the Pao cf. palustris, which require overlapping foods of various sizes to get everyone eating. I also keep feeding the smaller foods if i notice any not eating the new bigger food

I think most puffers like to test boundaries with their mouth. So it could work great one day and then be bitten, eaten, etc by the puffers at any point. What kind of algae? I would probably scrape / remove the surface algae when doing maintenence. But for plants substrate etc I have had variatus platys (almost exclusively females live long enough to get smart) live in an ambush puffer tank for a year and reproduce no issues. I have also had a kidders livebearer female live in a tank of 6 pao palustris adults for 5 months and then move in with with 3 adult hairy puffers for 3 months and counting. She eats all the food bits they spread across the tank. Livebearers are fairly smart and do clean up well for me with bigger puffers. I would probably try black chinned livebearers or maybe a short finned endler variety in a pea puffer tank if it were more of a plant surface algae. That would be with the understanding that the puffers might like them more than I do and a plan b might be needed should it go bad. If you have substrate and don't mind them i would also look at Malaysian trumpet snails. I have them in a dwarf chain loach tank you never see any during the day because the loach eat them but at night they come out and feed on algae etc.

Day 54 good comparison of fry starting to get adult coloration. Could change but they do seem to be starting to show males and females in the group. We still have that eye spot which is fascinating to me. I am curious when it goes away. Male ( almost certainly) Darker spot pattern below that belly line. same as adult males Female(almost certainly) Lighter olive up top and light pattern below almost no coloration to it

great stuff I bet you are 3 days to brine shrimp and a good amount of hair puffers growing from there

Colorado had a bit of a wind event yesterday. The power up here was among the 10,900 + households that had an outage as a result of that wind. Our power was lost from 11am until 10pm. BLUF it is interesting to see what occurs in a power outage and how I did not have the air pump I use, a 9 watt 6 LPM on any kind of battery back up, uninterrupted power supply, etc for the duration of this event. I also heat a few tanks the puffers vs the room since many of the species I am working on are cool water. This sensor is the top level of the cool water rack (unheated) it is the water temperature of a 26"x18"x9" polycarbonate tank with tight cover made from a restaurant supply commercial vegetable / soup storage container. It is located within the same room as the furnace and fish room water change sink. The temperature gradient is pretty smooth compared to the next chart. I attribute this to the furnace and its ductwork controlling the temperature of the room as it heats the ductwork. On Wednesday 12/15 the room temperature increased slightly after the power loss. The furnace was likely on prior to the loss in power and the ducts heated the room from 62.87° to 63.57° where it remained from noon to 6:01pm. The tank water temperature dropped down to 61.95° at midnight. The difference between the power loss and the heating cycle is something I had not considered prior to reviewing this sensor. The air, including the box filter, was off from 11am until 10 pm. For the duration of the outage I did not have a space blanket on this tank. No losses observed. I assume each tank in the room was similar temperature gradient. This rack contains Taiwanese Dragon Micro Goby (Schismatogobius ampluvinculus), Brazos Dwarf Mexican Crayfish (Cambarellus texanus), Cherry Shrimp (Neocaridina davidi), and Characodon audax "El Toboso" Black Prince Livebearer. No one really needs too much heat in that group By comparison the below chart is for the same event for the Pao cf. palustris fry tank a 20 gallon acrylic tank, a box filter and heavy plantings of duckweed, frogbit, Brazilian Pennywort, java moss, and subwassertang. They have a 200 watt heater attached to an inkbird controller with a 1 degree variation and a set temperature of 77°. Tanks is covered and a spaceblanket was put over the top of the tank when the power cut off. The power went out on a downcycle at 11am 76.55° where it steadily dropped to 74.21° at 3:01pm. The power briefly kicked back on and the temperature blipped back up to 74.57° before dropping down to 70.79° at 10:01pm. The heater brought the temperature up 7 ° over 60 minutes. It recovered to 77.74° at 1am. That drop was fairly concerning and I will probably have some portable powerstation option moving forward and maybe try to do an airpump in a cooler with heatpacks to keep the airtemperature up a bit and maybe retain heat in the tanks through the use of warmed air. This chart is the air temperature in the fish room where the 20 gallon tank and most of the heated tanks are located. During the outage the air temperature drop and the water temperature drop were a fairly similar pattern. The air dropped about 9° while the water dropped 7° all the acrylic tanks were similar temperatures based of the heater displays. Interesting to see the tracks of the temperatures for this event. To this point there have been no issues with the water quality or the health of the fish. Everyone has been active and eating. I may have lucked out with this one; perhaps the stressor of the temperature was survivable with the good food and water they normally live in.1 stressor and not many stressors. Has anyone every tried to flatten that temperature drop line a bit? What has worked best for you? I'm sure in nature the swings are bigger than that 9° and 7° but at a minimum i would probably have the air going next time.

Day 52 - Eating a ton and growing fast. We did a bit of a food graduation today. All 12 fry are now eating cherry shrimp culls to go with snails, whiteworms, blackworms, and a few scuds when found. I have also started a nightcrawler earthworm culture, and a dwarf crayfish culture to hopefully raise for sharing and for puffer food. I cut the "wild america" portion of the GIF. I felt I needed to get a little variety in their diet and some shelled food for a little bonus nutrition. This is the first time this puffer has encountered a shrimp. The arch, circle, look and evaluate, decide a safer approach, and feed from the safer end seems to be instinctual within the puffer brain. None have been pinched before so they would not have learned to approach from that end through personal experience or observation. Pretty neat to see and share a puffer fry using a hunting technique for the first time on a new food source they haven't encountered before.

Great stuff. Well deserved all. Looking forward to those unboxings

Day 50 ....mission impossible success 12 baby Pao cf. palustris same shot. About time to break up the males certainly a few, likely males, with level 11 anger on the spinal tap amplifier

Also looks very close to a rice fish to me with that body shape; I have not bred garra but suspect they are more likely to be down on the bottom of the tank than up in the water column like that. I have also not done giant danio before. Should be a fun to grow out.

Great sign. Nice batch of eggs there. This going to be amazing. Congrats

Nice. This is very cool to hear about for me. Looking forward to your posts. Yes I would say if you write anything on Pao baileyi it is probably the only info since an Amazonas magazine article from 2019, a Mekong field study in 1989 where they were discovered, my limited posts on the behaviors of my colony, and a few others. I've looked fairly hard for info with nearly no success but assume there are others besides you and I working with them they are just too amazing of a species. The amazonas article might be worth the read for you on the Pao baileyi breeding process with good photos. My limited experience is the Pao eat the bad eggs and not the good. I'd say you'll have a lot of practice with what works best for your group and water. The hairy puffer is a prolific species based off of a few studies. 3 days +/- old Pao cf. palustris. They take live brine at this point. These were palustris eggs not fertilized. I thought a few were good but all went bad quickly. I've determined, in my set up with that cave, my male will fertilize eggs after they appear just not sure on his timing yet. Pulled never developed. I also started feeding whiteworms at about day 16. I do daphnia seasonally up here. My pond just freezes solid in october and thaws back out in may. I haven't broke the code on growing daphnia in big numbers inside just yet but its on the list to break the code on those. Baby puffers eat much more food than other fry I've raised to the 40+ day mark. I'd put my guess at their body weight in food 2 or 3 times a day while growing. Hasn't slowed up yet with the palustris. This is one of them last night post worm feeding When the Hairy Puffer was first found 1989 field report with sketch drawings https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=baileyi+puffer&oq=baileyi#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3D1neKeu64vzQJ

Thanks. Small world. Nice to meet you electronically

That is so awesome. I need your skills with them. The palustris took probably a week or so to hatch I would guess but I haven't yet got that down to a science yet. There is some delay in fertilization from laying which i would guess is the case with the hairy as well. I leave the eggs with the male/ adults for a while base it off of the color of the egg before trying to grab some with the airline egg siphon trick. Posted that and a few notes in your thread as well. Congrats

Sorry was in office today. @VinmI also have had 3 hairy puffers in a colony since 2018 . But no viable eggs from that group so far. I plan on adding another couple at some point to encourage eggs and fry. Great species still my favorite puffer. For my Pao species breeding I will not pull eggs from the male until they darken up a bit. They took a while to get there with the Pao palustris and he didn't fertilize them if bothered too much. Eggs on slate hard to see but they mostly dark brown before pulling. I let the male fan the spawn, guard it from all things, remove the fungus, and guard them to the death. This last batch was 21 eggs pulled most left with male. I waited until they were so dark they were clearly ready to pop. My best Pao success has been the Pao cf. palustris which involved pulling only a portion of the eggs and pulling them as late as possible close to hatching. I used some coop airline tube to "pull" with the least amount of disruption. Airline was lightly held by a long pair of tongs to get to the eggs. I started a siphon with light methelene blue (MB) to theoretically sanitize the tube. The eggs were siphoned off the cave slate floor out to a container at the same level as the cave on outside the tank. My theory was this slows the speed of travel in the airline. The male attacked that tube fairly ferociously. I used the method si ce I wouldn't want to disrupt him or the layout. I left a bunch of eggs for the male guard and he was happy with that. The specimen container i siphoned into had light MB concentration was maybe a drop total and that was then floated in a 20 gallon with a rigid airline at about 1 bubble per second to break surface tension. I believe the hairy will be similar in development to the palustris. Vinegar eels starting once egg sack is gone and they stop looking like tiny balloons with eyes. Live brine at day 3 on, whiteworms around day 14-16, on from there as they grow. Best in heavy planted 20 with boxfilter and tons of food to grow out. They take off at danger any plants will give them a spot to hide and feel secure in my experience. The plants also limit them smashing into the tank sides when they flip out and warp speed away from whatever they think they saw or touched them. Congrats

Day 40 ... the case of the 11th puffer. Took 40 days to show but now 11 puffers. Guess the cover is decent enough in there. Could be another 1 or 2🤷‍♂️ Update now 12