Breeding Scarlet Badis

[memorywrangler]

I have had my eye out for a female scarlet badis for a while.  So much so, that I was know as "the guy who comes in looking for scarlet badis" at my LFS.  A few weeks ago, I brought home a promising candidate and after a few days of feasting on moina, eggs were apparent!

I picked up a companion for her and started quarantine.

They seemed healthy and happy, but not "in the mood."  

I moved the female out for a few days.  When I added her back it took about an hour for spawning start!  Hooray.  They spawned probably 10 times over the course of an hour before the female went to hide in a corner, her egg supply visibly depleted:

I moved both parents out of the the tank.

As the eggs started coming, I realized a I had a few mistakes and miscalculations:

1. I had put some plants in a small, removable container in the tank hoping they spawn there.  They did, but only some of the time.  They also spawned next to heater, behind a small pump in the tank and just here and there.
2. They eggs are incredibly small and almost neutrally buoyant, so when I tried to remove the container I think lost most of them.
3. I can barely the find the eggs in a glass petri dish when I know they are there.  Finding them on in the sand substrate in the tank is a non-starter.
4. The eggs are quite fragile.  I checked some under my microscope and the most amount of egg moving I did seemed to have damaged some of them.

I managed to move about 5 of them in a mini egg tumbler I have, but I can barely see them.

I've read it'll take about a week before they hatch and get through their yolk sacks, so I guess I'm just going to wait and watch.  The good news is that there's lots of life in the tank, so their should be food for the very tiny fry.  The potential bad news is that there's scuds in there too.  I'm concerned they may eat the fry.

In any case, in couple weeks I'll even have fry or I suspect the female may a new batch of eggs and I can again.

I'd love to hear how other people have managed collecting/incubating/hatching tiny eggs that get spread all over the place.

Thanks.

 

[CJs Aquatics]

I’ve been looking for a female of these for so long also, still no luck, congrats on the breeding 

[Jacob Hill-Legion Aquatics]

Congrats on the breeding! Hopefully you get fry to grow up but if you don’t at least you’ll know what not to do next time. Good luck

[Comradovich]

To remove the eggs, try using a plastic pipette. If you buy live foods, (or even some prepared foods), on Aquabid some of the suppliers usually include 2-3 of them with the product. I don't have a good suggestion for seeing the eggs in the first place. I am so near-sighted it almost qualifies as a super power, so I usually just take off my glasses.

The pipette is a solid strategy for getting a hold of a bunch of them. Also handy for separating them in a breeder box. You'd be surprised what you can do with a tiny bit of suction.

[memorywrangler]

Well, I put the back together again after a week of feasting on live food. A few things happened:

1. They spawned a few times that produced about 20 eggs in toto
2. They spawned a few times that that produced no eggs 
3. The female seems to lose interest before she was empty of eggs.
4. I took out the female, moved the male to a breeding box, and collected the eggs in a glass dish in the bottom of the tank.
5. During the night the suction cup on the breeding box failed, the male got lose and ate all the eggs!!!!

I also checked the eggs under my microscope and almost of all of them looked wrinkled or deflated and one was torn open.   Not sure what that means.

I guess I’ll again next week, this time I’m moving the eggs to their own tank.

[memorywrangler]

Are suggestions on how long to let the female recover before trying again?  She has visible eggs, but I don’t want to stress her out too much.

[Cmike15]

Both should have their color and the female should have eggs. Years ago i raised them and even though the female is pale there is a silvery sheen that's clear when healthy which i'm sure you've seen. at least a week but i've read 10 days between spawnings to condition.  I'd suggest if you see the female is full of eggs and you are keeping an eye on them earlier might be possible. it depends on the food, temps and possibly the time of year. 

This is an interesting little fish!

[memorywrangler]

I'm so sad!  My female got caught in the output of the breeder box I had her in and died.  I feel terrible.  She was such a pretty thing. RIP 

😞

 

 

[memorywrangler]

Well, I found these two at my LFS yesterday.  We'll see what happens as they grow out a bit.  I reasonably confident about the lighter one being female.  Not sure about the darker one with the black spot.

Anyone want to hazard a guess just for fun?

 

[memorywrangler]

Both of the fish above turned out to be female, so I'm back in business!  And I found another potential female a couple days ago (picture below).

I set up my male in a clean 5.5 gallon for a couple days to let him get situated, then I introduced one of the females above and spawned repeatedly over the course of a couple hours.  

The couple spawned on some plastic plants I added and under the heater and maybe behind the filter.  About half way through I added some guppy grass and they liked that as well.  I think I might just use guppy grass in the future.   The eggs seemed to be slightly stick and I think some of the stuck to the plants.

I removed both fish, the sponge filter, and, out of an abundance of caution, added some methylene blue to keep the fungus away.  That was 72 hours ago, and I just spotted about 20 impossibly small fry (on the blue background)!  I'd be planning to feed them from a paramecium culture I have going, but now I'm worried even those might be too big.

I understand it'll take a few days for them to finish their yolk sacks, and, in the meantime, I'm performing 50% water changes to get rid of the methylene blue, so the paramecia will survey long enough to be eaten.

Hopefully, some of them will survive.
 

[memorywrangler]

Here's a photo through my microscope at 48 hours post-spawning.

For comparison, I included a paramecium my paramecium culture and a ciliate from a random jar of infusoria I had sitting around.  I guess I could imagine it eating paramecia in a few days.

At first, I thought those "tufts" might be fungus, but the they very evenly spaced and by fiddling around in photoshop I could see that they are in side the body.  I found this picture of pigment cells in a Haplochromis species.  They look vaguely similar, so maybe they are the start of the stripes or something? 

[memorywrangler]

Some of them are surviving some of them are not -- I've found a few tiny corpses.  They still very difficult to see unless I put my head directly over the tank and look straight down.

I've been feeding them paramecia, and it's creating a white mulmy layer on the the bottom of the tank, which I'm sure has lots of things for them to eat.  Somewhere in this mess there some baby fish...

It makes me think I should just start feeding coop fry food because that stuff always creates lots of infusoria-rich mulm when I use it.

I know they are eating because I got this cool video.  I especially like how you can see it lock on to the rotifer with both it's eyes before it goes in for the kill...

 

[memorywrangler]

I've moved them out of the 5 gallon and into a fry container, so I can feed them something other than infusoria and paramecium.  It also makes them easier to count.  I counted 30 of them in this image, and I counted 34 yesterday.  Not bad!  They got very good at hiding when they had the whole aquarium to roam around in, and I was worried I had lost 2/3 of them.

I have also collecting pictures through microscope.  The bigger ones are are now larger than my microscope's field of view are have notably orange bellies when I feed BBS.  I think the smaller ones still need vinegar eels or paramecium.

I was also surprised to see that vinegar eels are thinner than paramecium.  

[Odd Duck]

So tiny!  Why does it constantly seem so fraught with danger for such tiny ones?  Good job with getting them this far and looking forward to more positive posts!  🤞🏻

[Creedmoor Aquatics]

I love the microscope photos, this is great documentation!

[memorywrangler]

On 8/6/2023 at 5:54 PM, Odd Duck said:

So tiny!  Why does it constantly seem so fraught with danger for such tiny ones?

Not so tiny now.  I think all 34 are all taking BBS.  Now I just have to feed them four times a day.

Edited August 16, 2023 by memorywrangler

[memorywrangler]

Here's some more data.  Clearly I have too much time on my hands.  The thing I'm happiest about is that I seem to have had almost no mortality.  I get different numbers when I count, but the max has always been 34 or 35.

The bad news is that I have to go out of town from Sunday to Tuesday, and I don't have a good way to feed them.   I think I might dump them in with their mother and my two other females.  They are a tank full of java moss which has lots to eat.  I'm going be sorry to not have such a close eye on them though.

Growth rate:

Length distribution on the 2023-08-14

Here's the underlying photo for the histogram:

They are even beginning to look like badis:

 

 

[Odd Duck]

You could rinse some vinegar eels and dump them in.  They can live a week in fresh water but I wouldn’t want to dump a bunch of vinegar in the tank.  If you can get your hands on Ceriodaphnia or Daphnia you could dump 300-400 in a 10 gallon since they live in fresh water.

[memorywrangler]

On 8/18/2023 at 8:07 PM, Odd Duck said:

They can live a week in fresh water

I think I’ll try that.   No one around here has daphnia available now.  For some reason it’s only available during the cooler months.  I’ve had moina cultures on and off, but they recently crashed.

[memorywrangler]

I took another census today.  I didn't lose any while I was gone, but I found one corpse today, which is not too surprising:  A few of them have looked sickly for a while.

They are growing well, and looking very badis-like.

Everything is going smoothly.  Lots of BBS.  Now I just have to start thinking about what to do with them...

[Odd Duck]

I really appreciate the time and effort you’re putting in to all the documentation!  It’s very interesting!

[memorywrangler]

Latest update.  We are now at 10 weeks.

I pulled 6 fry and took some pictures.  Some are the same fish.  They are beginning to get stripes.  I've also had decent luck selling them:  I've been selling them in unsexed groups of 3 for $36 or 6 for $60.    So far I've sold 3 groups.   I won't be quitting my day job just yet...

[memorywrangler]

Here's an especially pretty picture from a couple weeks ago.

[Ben P.]

Just seeing this for the first time, what makes females so hard to find?

[memorywrangler]

On 10/3/2023 at 7:11 AM, Ben P. said:

what makes females so hard to find?

That's an excellent question.  I wondered that for a long time. There are three theories I have heard:

1. There's something weird about sex ratios, so mostly male are produced in captivity.  This seems unlikely, but I guess I'm about to find out 🙂
2. There's an international cabal of scarlet badis breeders systematically refusing to sell females.  This is the most amusing option.  Also far fetched.  I've heard females are pretty easy to find in parts of Europe for whatever reason.
3. The females are quite drab, so most people don't want them, so the importers don't import them.

#3 seems like the simplest answer, especially since they are not very a lucrative fish.  "Unsexed" scarlet badis (almost all of which are male) sell in my LFS for $9 and online for $10-$15 (not terribly much more than, say, nice live bearers), so it's not like discus, peacock cichlids, or those zebra plecos where there's big money to be made in breeding.  I haven't looked carefully, but casual observation shows that even though peacock females are drab, there's a pretty good market for them.

Finally, I think badis lovers enjoy the thrill of the hunt.  I'm trying to sell mine and I'm in contact with some other breeders doing the same.  We all agree that the actual demand for females is much lower than we expected based on the traffic in badis-themed discussion groups on line.  These groups consists largely of people asking if a fish looks female and bemoaning the lack of females.  I think buying female badis is probably not as fun, especially since breeding them is nothing terribly special (they spawn easily and fry are pretty robust, although tiny). 

That said, one breeder reportedly sold two females for $100 each, which seems nuts to me (but I will probably have some pretty-certain females in a few weeks, and if anyone wants to pay me $100 for, I'll be happy to oblige 🙂