EPAquatics

My 0.02 cents here, if you are going to ever pull an apisto cave with eggs in it, don't use an airstone to oxygenate the cave. A gentle water flow is better, since you don't risk having a bubble of air forming around the clutch, thus killing the eggs. I have a fry tank setup very closely resembling Dean's system, and I direct the incoming water line for the tray into the mouth of the cave. It has worked well for me when pulling active caves. I then use a pipette to suck/relocate wrigglers that stray away from the group. I do that every hour or so when I'm around. Parental care can be closely imitated, but never replicated. When in doubt, leave the fry with the female whenever possible. They do a pretty good job protecting fry from predators (most of the time). As @tolstoy21 stated, the males tend to be hit and miss for parental care.

Given a large enough school, and proper conditioning, a school of Cories can effectively spawn daily. A few females every day, on a cycle. My Peppered Cories are doing this right now. New eggs literally every day.

My advice, and what I am doing, is to speak directly with your target sales locations. Ask them specifically what they want/need/would be interested in. Try to stick with species that are ordinarily difficult to breed in your area. For example, I live in SoCal, where the water is generally bad for breeding South American species. I go the extra mile (and expense) to make RODI water to breed Apistos/Angels/Cories/Plecos. Because most people won't do the necessary steps to successfully breed any of my target species, I all but guarantee I will have low competition. For people with soft water, the inverse could be possible. Maybe African Cichlids are in high demand in your area, but nobody wants to make the jump to changing up water chemistry to viably breed them. And a word of advice that I learned the hard way, make sure that what you are breeding isn't a highly common farmed species. My mistake, was allowing a pair of Silver Angelfish to spawn 3 times in a row. Now I have ~700 nearly worthless (I can't hope to compete with huge fish farm prices) baby Angels, that I will spend months trying to sell. Breed uncommon species, and only let one clutch grow out at a time until you understand how many you can reliably sell per rate of breeding. Even if the species you are breeding is in high demand, if you allow the parents to spawn 100 fish per week, you'll very quickly saturate the market. Hope this helps, and good luck! @TheSwissAquarist

So, after I made this post, I suddenly stopped having hatching difficulties. Still have no idea what the issue was, but it has returned to normal operation 🤷‍♂️ @ange

That was my next step! If I figure it out I'll share what I found!

Thanks for the love ange! It was something I threw together pretty quickly with scraps of painted plywood from an old tank stank. I didn't bother painting the fresh cut edges since it wasn't really necessary, but it works exceptionally well for what it is! Where the hatchery is, is located in the corner of the room next to a 75g display tank. No ventilation hits it, nor is there anything but water stored near it. I'll post a picture from a wider angle to show the surroundings. The container next to it is what I mix my brine in. The bottles are sealed at the bottom with these neat little bottle caps for CO2 reactors that I found on Amazon. They use a silicone rubber gasket to seal. The top of the containers are just the bottom part of the bottles that I cut off when making the system, turned upside down to keep water splashes down and lower heat loss/evap. Water parameters are exactly identical across all four bottles, since I mix my brine separately and then pour the mixed water into the bottles from the same container. I wouldn't think that that would be an issue. I live in SoCal, so my water is hard and high pH. Tap is like 8.2ph, 16dGH, 4dKH. It only spends ~24hrs in the bottle before being replaced with new brine. When I clean the bottles, I use just my very clean hands and tap water to wipe the sides down with. Nothing but fresh water or brine ever goes in the bottles. All bottles are treated the same as far as cleaning is concerned, and this is the only one that's affected. I'm lost!!!

Hey all, I am experiencing an issue with hatching out BBS. I have a home-made setup (pictured) consisting of four 1 liter bottles. Each one is completely identical, has a siphon tube and air line/stone connected at the base. The heat is created by a single 25w halogen lamp placed directly in the center of all four bottles, which keeps the bottles between 79-83F at all times. I hatch two bottles per day: one pair today, the other tomorrow, etc. I use Aquarium Co-Op eggs and either Co-Op or Fritz salt at 1tbsp/liter of water, premixed in another container for consistency. I have been successfully hatching up to 1/2tbsp of eggs per bottle for the last 3 months without incident. Suddenly, one of the four bottles (front right in picture) has given me two consecutive hatch rotations with basically no eggs hatching. All things are exactly the same, down to the amount of air being driven in each bottle. All bottles share the same temperature, brine water source container, egg container, parts, etc. Now one bottle is failing, and only one bottle. Nothing has changed in months. The only recent thing that happened is that I wiped down the inside of the bottles with my (clean) hand and clean tap water a week ago to remove build-up and slime as part of regular maintenance to the hatchery. All bottles received the same treatment. Why would one our of four suddenly be failing? I figured that the NERM hivemind would be able to help. Any ideas are appreciated!