Surprise! I've got easter eggs this year, after all.

[Comradovich]

Well, the plan for this spring was to breed my neon tetras that I was conditioning up. Then I was going to collect those fry after a few days in the dark, and raise them up in a breeder box. Making slow, reasonable tweaks to the process as I went along, also getting some good cultures set up for when it was time to raise up my slightly harder to breed fish.

Yeah.

I noticed some activity tonight next to the jar of Süßwassertang that I'm holding next to the tank after I reverse respired the entire collection... and in the words of Gedde Watanabi: "Supplies!" While I'm on the subject of movie quotes, I'd like to just say: Dang you, "and Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm", dang you to fudgin' heck. Prime suspects are pitbull plecos, which I'm finding almost no data on egg raising, so I'm gonna treat it like Otos...

First pic is the eggs on the glass, removed those with the cardboard from a gift card and a pipette. Probably will do the next batch I find with an actual plastic gift card, I just couldn't find anything flexible enough on short notice. They're currently chilling in the green lidded specimen jar you can see on the bottom of the 2nd pic with a few drops of methylene blue. Plan is to stick them into the left side of that breeder box, with the middle section of Süßwassertang providing cover for any infusoria I can start up on short notice. I also have some Hikari first bites. Or I could do the old paintbrush with repashy dust on it if it comes to that. Going to start boiling water over old broccoli as soon as I finish this post. I've got filter floss ready to dam the exit of the breeder box once I get a better handle on the flow and the declorinated water works its way all the way through. Shouldn't lose any wigglers or fry.

Really, really wish both my F1 ghost shrimp hadn't died in planaria quarantine. I could've used a nanny shrimp, and I don't trust my surviving scuds around eggs. Trying to decide if the breeder box also needs some floating plants to promote infusoria.

This time I am about halfway prepared for the surprise spawn. Was hoping to be closer to all the way prepared, but I've made a start.

[Guppysnail]

Congratulations 🎉 I hope they hatch for you. Fish peoples ideas of hunting Easter eggs is very different from non- fish folks. 🤣

[Comradovich]

Yeah, it's definitely the pitbull plecos. I'm watching the big female, (well, big as in close to 2"), leave me another clutch on the back wall of the aquarium. I'm watching her deposit, but what I'm not seeing her do is T-pose. There are definitely males nearby, I'm just not sure if she's quite worked out the mechanics yet. She might be placing duds. For the last spawn I chased off a male I thought was spawn robbing but he might've just been frustrated enough to try "finishing the job" without her. It'll be their very first spawn.

For anyone using the search command later, here's how I spawned Pitbull Plecos:

1. I removed and reverse respired my plants. Meaning the 20G was essentially sand and a few stones while the plants all got an overnight bath in another room. While they were out, I did two big water changes of 60-70%. First one was right after I removed the plants, to keep any extra nutrients leaching out of exposed root tabs from fouling my water. Second one was within 24 hrs of the first, as a way to compensate for any ammonia or nitrate spikes caused by sudden plant removal from a pretty well-stocked tank. Both changes were with cooler water, and done around evening.

2. It's been stormy in Salt Lake City, but it also got to 70 for two days last week. During this time I left the window open, sometimes until late at night. Since this is an unheated tank, the temps inside would be naturally fluctuating from a Springtime high to a Springtime low in the high 50s or low 60s. 

3. I was conditioning the neon tetras to breed by feeding frozen daphnia two-three times during the week. Between that they got normal Top Fin fish flakes and some Fluval Bug Bites (Bottom Feeder Formula). So, nothing particularly pricey or hard to obtain. Lots of protein, though.

4. I replaced the plants but held a bunch back. Everything was trimmed while I was reverse respiring. This created two "islands" in the tank of driftwood and java fern/swords. There is now a clear kind of channel through the middle that's spotted with local granite and shale stones. They seem to think they're in the center of a river, and this more open area is where they hang out. The egg deposits are at both ends of this channel on the glass.

So your big takeaways are:

1. High protein to condition. Would suspect the thawed frozen daphnia being blown around by a HOB filter are simulating bugs washed downstream.

2. Big water changes to simulate rain coming downstream. (Doesn't seem to need particularly soft water, mine goes through a water softener which just turns the minerals into mineral salts. Still shows up as "very soft" on the test strip, but my TDS is closer to 200).

3. Natural temp changes throughout the day from pleasantly warm to reasonably cool.

4. Potentially a habitat that somewhat mimics the middle of a fast flowing river.

[Comradovich]

I'm just going to apologize to the mods in advance for continually bumping my own thread. Info on this species is hard to come by online, so I'm planning on adding my own updates as I go. Maybe this will all be helpful to someone else giving this experiment a try.

Attached is my first pic of wigglers. Eggs first laid to hatch time is just barely under 1 week. I see online that the only source I could find on eggs was pegging them in the 3-4 days range. Clearly, I had a slightly different experience. They hatched at night, which I suspect is a survival adaptation, so you don't need to keep checking the eggs during the day. Wigglers are around a quarter inch long, (that line on the right is the plastic divider of a Marina/Fluval breeder box). Wigglers seem to be top oriented, (meaning they prefer near the water line). A good 60% of the spawn fungused up. So if you are doing daily checks be sure remove all the white fuzzy eggs. Wigglers are transparent to slightly whitish, so a viable egg will either looks clear or have a slight brownish tint to it. Bottom line: if it looks unfertilized, it's probably viable anyway. Again, this is an unheated tank, and daytime Temps in SLC dipped again. So I shut the windows and left the heat on to the mid-70s.

My attempt at culturing infusoria was a bust. I regret doing it in my bedroom. Where I sleep now has the distinctive odor of broccoli fart. Which means we're onto my fall-back attempt at culturing. You can see the mass of Süßwassertang in the center of the breeder box pic at the start of this thread. That was reverse respired, so it started out completely clean of aerobic life. I left it in the breeder box flow so that it was exposed to tank water where infusoria from the main 20G could occasionally settle. They should have made a small colony in the week since the eggs were laid. This colony will not be large enough to support the fry much past a week or so, but by then they ought to be big enough for me to introduce unmixed Repashy dust, hikari first bites, and the like. I'm going to lift the grate and give the wigglers access to the clump later today. The wigglers do not appear to be small enough to slip through the grate on their own. I have cut a piece of filter floss for the outflow of the breeder box, just in case.

Age of adults at first breeding... not entirely sure, but it's mid April now, and I acquired these from Dan's Fish back in November. They were clearly juveniles then, (~1.5" long), just bigger than a full grown white cloud. Since then, the largest has gotten close to 2.25 inches. Thus, they breed pretty young and are probably ready much sooner than you expect. Only one of these six is what I would call fully grown for this species. They top out at around ~2.5 inches. Most of my adults are nearing the 2" range, they seem to be the same size as a mid-sized otocinclus. Remember that you want 4-6 adults if you're going to try for breeding, as they look like a pleco, but behave much more like a corydoras or otocinclus. 

[Comradovich]

I wanted to add an update. My phone camera is having trouble focusing on the little guys, so this will be without a pic. I have 7 fry as of last night's count. From a batch of between 40-50 eggs. Today I can count six easily, I suspect one is off in the Süßwassertang hiding, which may also hide a few more fry, as more than 7 eggs may have hatched. Turn around time from wigglers to fry is only about two or three days. The fry already have two distinct pectoral fins, and their bellies have filled with something brownish green. This tells me they've finished the yolk sac and started eating... something. While I know the usual fry requirement is "free swimming", these are pleco fry. I think I'm going to have to settle for "has distinct finnage" and "is vacuum sealed to the plastic in a completely different area than last time I looked".

I say "something" in their bellies because I have two candidates for it. The tank water moving through the breeder box has added a little bit of mulm and tannins, which seems to be giving me a bit of brown diatom algae. Nothing to worry about, I just used a bit of airline hose to siphon it back into the main tank. They could be eating that algae. I also gave them a bit of Repashy "Super Green" when I fed the adults. Tried to estimate about what they could handle during the night, with a little overage. Idea here being that if they did eat it, then I wanted them to have a little bit of waste food by morning so I'd know they'd eaten all they could. I blew a bit of repashy dust into the tank area while they were still working on yolk sacs, with the idea being that I'd train them to take gel food ASAP. Take a dry pipette, dip into jar so just the tip is coated, pop into breeder box hole and pump a few times... The mixed Repashy gel looks like it's been stirred up quite a bit, but it could have just decayed from gel form. As it never lasts the full night in my tank, I have no way of knowing which. I'll use a pipette to get the leftovers out of the breeder box and give them another fresh bit of gel later on tonight.

I have walter worms and banana worms arriving today, so we'll see if they like live foods. If instead they're going for Repashy though, well happy days ahead. A fry I can raise on Repashy is straight up "easy mode". If your Local Fish Store doesn't carry Repashy, you can buy some here, and there's probably an Amazon fulfillment warehouse with a few dozen jars on a shelf within 200 miles of wherever you are right now. It's a dry good, so it ships cheap and relatively fast.

{Edit} okay, there's #7, and he seems to be working his way across the plastic closer to the Repashy blob. Guess I have my answer on the food. Dang, these things are easy.

[nabokovfan87]

On 4/13/2023 at 6:11 PM, Comradovich said:

Prime suspects are pitbull plecos, which I'm finding almost no data on egg raising, so I'm gonna treat it like Otos...

Yeah. They have flat mouths so they like your diatoms and stuff like repashy.

For the first couple of weeks I would feed just the powder. Once they get a bit more developed then feeding the full gelatinized food form.

On 4/24/2023 at 10:46 AM, Comradovich said:

While I know the usual fry requirement is "free swimming", these are pleco fry. I think I'm going to have to settle for "has distinct finnage"

Yeah. Once they are fully formed they should be doing better. Usually it's 4-6 weeks.

@Odd Duck

Any tips? Have you seen these as fry before?

Edited April 27, 2023 by nabokovfan87
add clarity

[Odd Duck]

On 4/27/2023 at 10:30 AM, nabokovfan87 said:

Any tips? Have you seen these as fry before?

I have not.

I think @Comradovich sounds right on track, though.  To see food in the belly this quick is always a good sign, I would say.  Nice work!  Can’t wait to see pics!

[Comradovich]

Wow, today was busy. I managed to confirm that they can lay again approximately two weeks after the first spawn. Did a test 80% water change on the 20 G yesterday and they left me some eggs on the glass again. Much smaller spawn this time, and they were slightly better at hiding them. Took forever to get 9 eggs off the glass behind the amazon sword. Yeah, 9 wasn't so good for a spawning event. I suspect that I need to give the females more time to fill up with eggs in the interim. They could be bred like Bristlenose, but probably should be given longer to rest up. Fish are smaller, and clutches are smaller, but the fry seem to develop faster than BNs.

Then as long as I was already in the tank grabbing eggs, I netted and separated out the neons I originally intended to breed. Into two shoe-box storage tubs in the closet with them. We'll see if they work out how to get things done tomorrow, I guess. I do have all this new live food culturing. I know baby neons are live food eaters.

I dipped the eggs in methalyne blue again, probably overdid that. Specimen container looked like it was full of Powerade that the ice had just melted into. Unless YouTube is washing out the color in videos a bit, this is likely at least a shade darker than I needed. I put the eggs in with their siblings, who do not seem to really be interested in them. Last ones didn't get enough MB, this batch may have got too much. I'll be dialing this in on the next try, I guess.

Fry have distinct ventral fins now. Can't really see if they've got dorsal, adipose or anal fins, but they tend not to really flare those as adults, either. All 7 fry are free swimming, and will hide if I get too close to the plastic. They seemed interested in the walter worms yesterday, but they didn't really move for either them or the banana worms today. I've been using the "rubber band trick" from Chris "The Mad Aquarist" Biggs' last video on corydoras breeding, and that does work well to get worms into the breeder box without getting your culture media in there too. So far, that pencil eraser sized blob of Repashy gel is the biggest hit on the food front. I do notice them sneaking closer to that whenever the lights are lowered. It is a pain to siphon out the waste each day, but it is nice to know they're definitely eating. I dunno if they're necessarily attacking the gel so much as waiting for it to melt and then picking off the leftovers, but they are often in the mess when I go to clean in the morning.

I started the paramecium culture I ordered, giving a few drops to the breeder box to seed it, just in case. Gotta get an air pump and some tubing to get my chlorella culture started off before I order some daphnia. I'll be rounding things off tonight by starting cultures of micro worms and vinegar eels. There's a lot of foods I can throw at these to test responses.

@nabokovfan87 if you were planning to assist with Google-fu earlier, I can probably save you a search. Thus far the only real breeding reports I can find are:

This "Shane's World" report from 2004, which is the go to link-back on breeding.

And this guy from Aquascaper.org which has some additional details from 2017.

I've read these reports in the past as this species is one I've kept and unintentionally bred at least twice. I'm trying to get together something a bit more detailed and useful here so that future searches will have some actual meat to them. Breeding reports are great, but they tend to stop once you have wigglers or fry. I'm hoping to help others work through the follow up questions of: "and now what?" So far, the answer has been: ensure they get cycled tank water moving through, remember to feed them a little, clean them in the morning, and leave them alone. I am still amazed at how young this fish is spawning, I figured they'd need at least a year after I first purchased the juveniles. I guess when they decide it's time, it's time.

I have started the Planet Catfish spawning report, but I can't seem to get all six of them to line up on the glass so I can measure pectoral fins. Some of these are definitely male, but I may have to dangle some lager near the tank to tell for sure.

 

{Edit} I have included the following pics as an edit, rather than doing a complete update. @Odd Duck asked for pics, well here you go. Pic one has the best focus I could manage on the fry. In pic two, you can see a wiggler and one of the fry. I notice the fry in pic 2 is pooping, which was not planned.

Wigglers hatched out almost immediately after being moved to the breeder box. Which tells me that the 2-3 days both of the previous links mentioned might be an average hatch time. Both of my results were outside of this range. I know I got to this latest batch within 24 hrs of triggering the spawn. There may also be a hatch trigger, possibly either the presence of food interacting with the egg membrane or the storm front I used to trigger the spawn moving out of the area. It's the 28th today, first batch of fry hatched on the 19th in the night, so we're only looking at around a week of difference between that fry and his wiggler tank mate. The vent fins are really hard to get into focus, but believe me they are there. Egg to wiggler ratio on the 2nd batch was 6/9, so maybe I didn't overdo it on the Methalyne Blue.

{Edit #2} Another daily small update. After an additional 24 hrs, the rest of the 9 eggs hatched, so from 6/9 to 9/9 on this batch. I guess slightly darker than a sports drink is the prime Methalyne blue concentration. I guess the tip here is not to give up on the eggs until you see them go white with fungus. I had an unreported wiggler death on the first batch, 8 actually hatched, but only 7 made it to the fry stage. The death was almost immediately after hatching, so I'm not sure what I could've done differently. Seems about par for the course on wigglers, though.

{Edit #3} Here's a May 4th pic where the oldest are two weeks and the youngest are a week. You can see the growth difference in these. Big ones are pushing 12mm. They really start looking like tiny adults once they hit a full centimeter SL. Obviously, the breeder box is clear so they're not trying to substrate match, but you can see all the rest of the coloration starting to appear.

 

Edited May 5, 2023 by Comradovich
New pic.

[Comradovich]

So, final update of this thread. Below are two pics. The one with the cherry shrimp is from three weeks old, and the second one is from a month on after I moved the oldest seven into the 5.5G. I separated the oldest batch out so that the younger group would have more of a chance at hitting the food. This batch has made itself super busy looking for any stray green spot algae I may have missed in the 5.5G.

If you are finding this thread using the search command from the future, hello from 2023! I have submitted a breeding report to Planetcatfish.com on Parotocinclus Jumbo, you can find that right here. I'll have to remember to update it with 3 month and 6 month pics. All of the data from this thread is contained there in what I hope is an easy to pick through manner. It is apparently worth 73 points, and I have no idea if that's a good or bad amount. Maybe I can spend it on one of those rubber pop up toys from the 80s, since that's what I sank all my ski-ball tickets into.

I'm hoping info like this will convince people to give this pleco a try. It's the sort of hard working algae eater people look for when they pick up otos, (although it specializes more in rocks and glass instead of plants). It also isn't super difficult to breed successfully. Perhaps @Irene or @Bentley Pascoe might consider giving these a try as a video project. They're a little spendy when purchased from Dan's Fish, but not a purchase you can really regret.

[nabokovfan87]

On 5/18/2023 at 2:04 PM, Comradovich said:

I'm hoping info like this will convince people to give this pleco a try. It's the sort of hard working algae eater people look for when they pick up otos, (although it specializes more in rocks and glass instead of plants).

100% agreed.  One of my favorites and for bigger tanks they are a workhorse pleco on the glass for algae cleaning.

 

[TheSwissAquarist]

On 4/14/2023 at 3:11 AM, Comradovich said:

Well, the plan for this spring was to breed my neon tetras that I was conditioning up. Then I was going to collect those fry after a few days in the dark, and raise them up in a breeder box. Making slow, reasonable tweaks to the process as I went along, also getting some good cultures set up for when it was time to raise up my slightly harder to breed fish.

Yeah.

I noticed some activity tonight next to the jar of Süßwassertang that I'm holding next to the tank after I reverse respired the entire collection... and in the words of Gedde Watanabi: "Supplies!" While I'm on the subject of movie quotes, I'd like to just say: Dang you, "and Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm", dang you to fudgin' heck. Prime suspects are pitbull plecos, which I'm finding almost no data on egg raising, so I'm gonna treat it like Otos...

First pic is the eggs on the glass, removed those with the cardboard from a gift card and a pipette. Probably will do the next batch I find with an actual plastic gift card, I just couldn't find anything flexible enough on short notice. They're currently chilling in the green lidded specimen jar you can see on the bottom of the 2nd pic with a few drops of methylene blue. Plan is to stick them into the left side of that breeder box, with the middle section of Süßwassertang providing cover for any infusoria I can start up on short notice. I also have some Hikari first bites. Or I could do the old paintbrush with repashy dust on it if it comes to that. Going to start boiling water over old broccoli as soon as I finish this post. I've got filter floss ready to dam the exit of the breeder box once I get a better handle on the flow and the declorinated water works its way all the way through. Shouldn't lose any wigglers or fry.

Really, really wish both my F1 ghost shrimp hadn't died in planaria quarantine. I could've used a nanny shrimp, and I don't trust my surviving scuds around eggs. Trying to decide if the breeder box also needs some floating plants to promote infusoria.

This time I am about halfway prepared for the surprise spawn. Was hoping to be closer to all the way prepared, but I've made a start.

Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s neons and Cory’s are getting frisky! 

Edited May 23, 2023 by TheSwissAquarist