Intentional white cloud breeding pond

[keddre]

Setting up my first intentional breeding pond for white clouds this year. They did good last year with a half-butt effort, but I let them stay out too late and they ended up freezing to death around February (survived a couple ice-overs, but it got colder than I expected).

The setup: 20 gallon planter (15 gallons of water actual), seeded a month ago with a year old sponge filters from my 55 (I should add that this pond was setup all winter though from last year's tubbing season). Like last year they are powered by solar air pumps that cut on around mid-day and cut off around 10ish pm. I will be adding a second though for two/pond. Also a month ago, I added scuds, detritus worms and black worms from my 55, and I tried some water flea eggs that I got off a big box website and it appears to have worked (hatched indoor first). Substrate is about 1/2" of detritus from last year, crushed coral and crushed lava rocks for the eggs to fall into.

Plants: Peace lilly that's doing "meh," some kind of emergent grass, hornwort, duckweed (to feed goldfish in different setup), and I'll move Cabomba over if it does well in a different pond.

Water params: From last year, temps will run 50-90 degrees depending on the day, and usually around 15degrees cooler at night. I have been running ghost feedings with an auto-feeder every 8 hours for a month and params are 0ammonia, 0 nitrite, 0.5 nitrate, off the charts hardness/kh/ph

The fish: now the fun part, I had to hit the LFS yesterday because I had 0 females, but my starting population will be green finned/peach body shaped males from my main population and generic females. The hopes is that they breed enough that next year I can narrow the population down to two different lines of peach colored white clouds and green-finned white clouds

 

Random aside: Water will be changed every other day to water garden

 

Photos: Sorry, it's hard to get a picture of the green fins

 

[Jacob Hill-Legion Aquatics]

Good luck man I hope it works out for you this time.