Phirefase Breeding Journal

[Phirefase]

Thought I would share some fish breeding successes that I have had over my short time keeping fish. Maybe it will help others, and it will probably keep me from forgetting how I bred some fish later on in life. I'll go year by year to start, but might go more often depending on how much fish breeding I have done.

2020

Fish Room Status: 2 tanks

I was in my last semester of uni and was bored out of my mind in quarantine. My roommate had got a saltwater tank in January and I decided that I should convert my snake tank to a fish tank since the snake had long escaped(my roommates were not happy with that ordeal). I had just a 20 gallon and a 5 gallon tank sitting on my desk for the rest of the year. I then moved home at the end of the year.

Xiphophorus maculatus/bumble bee platy - 2020

This was the first fish that I kept and I got I think 6 of them in total. The second day that I had them they had already given birth to fry. Since I didn't really know what I was doing, I tore down the tank and caught every little fry I could find and put a divider in the tank for the fry. This worked out fine when I was a bored college student, but I found more efficient ways to get the fry with later species. I eventually got to the point where I just had a big clump of java moss that would protect the fry from their parents. This sustained the colony until I sold them around 2022 due to a move. Interesting thing to note about these guys is that they did have cancerous growths on some of the black parts of their body. I just fed them and did water changes with hard water. I had a heater on this tank but have no clue what it was set to.

Neocaridina davidii - 2020

Put them in a tank by themselves, feed them well, use hard water, and wait. Honestly the biggest challenge with these guys is culling the ones that don’t color out right. I have a blue variant right now, but don’t intend on selling them because counting them is too tedious for what I can sell them for. I have them mostly for just enjoyment and I am experimenting with using them to clean eggs instead of methylene blue.
 

[Phirefase]

2021

Fish Room Status: Trial and Error. Lots of Error… And somewhere around 20 tanks

After I moved in with my mom, I took up shop in the basement with all my junk, including my fish tanks. I had a job with a place that I worked at in high school, but it wasn’t going to be a career for me. I ended up living there for around 5 months until I got a better job a long ways away. Over the course of this year and a little in 2020 and 2022, I moved from uni to my moms, then to my grandparents, then to a small town apartment, then to my aunt and uncles, then finally to my current flat. Sufficed to say I think I have more experience moving fish than the average fishkeeper. 

This is the year where I accelerated my learning on fish, getting involved in my local club, and when I graduated from someone with fish tanks to a real NERM. I started the year with building a rack with DIY ~5 gallon acrylic tanks that I made with scrap material from my job. Nothing of that setup still exists. The rack was in my moms basement and too cumbersome to move, and I had an incident with one of my acrylic tanks blowing a seam right in front of me.
When I moved to the small town apartment, it had 2 bedrooms so obviously one of them became the fish room. I still had the acrylic tanks with me, but had now shifted to using 14x36 NSF wire racks from a big box store. I still use these and 14x24 wire racks to hold 20 longs and 10s respectively. 

If I had to sum up the year as a theme, it would be trial and error. I was starting to figure out what I liked to keep and learned through experience just how complex a fish room can be. Some of the lessons that I learned are that heating individual tanks becomes a mess of power strips and cords, having a usb air pump for each tank is also a mess of cords and they failed more often than expected, and that its worth the peace of mind to just buy half off tanks from petco.

Poecilia reticulata/green tiger guppy - 2021

Learning from breeding the platies, I separated the female guppy when she looked visibly pregnant. Like the platies, I just fed them with flake foods and I kept these guys in hard water. I sold them all eventually to a store because I didn’t spending so much time culling them. I also had a heater in their tanks, but don’t remember what I had it set to.

Apistogramma cacatouides - 2021

I bought a pair of these guys and set up a 20 gallon long similar to how Dean set up the 10 gallon tank in his Apisto video. Line of sight blocks and java moss and java fern. I fed them vibra bites and BBS, and used an RODI unit to change their water. Then just wait until the parents decided they wanted to spawn. I think I had a heater in this tank, but at this point I had a fish room and some of the tanks had heaters and some didn’t. Anyways, when the fry hatched, I kept both parents in there and didn’t notice any issue with the father eating the fry, but the mother wouldn’t let him near the fry for a couple weeks. This pair ended up spawning for me a bunch after this and to this day I have yet to find another pair as prolific as them. After this original pair passed away, I have had trouble with spawning their children, as they have smaller spawns and more have bent spines and other deformities. Other than that, if you want to see real paternal care, this is an easy enough species to spawn and its just cool to watch the fry.
 

Edited April 26 by Phirefase

[Phirefase]

2022

Fish Room Status: Personal Stability with 30 tanks.

Now we get to my current fishroom in its infancy. I moved into a two bedroom apartment on the ground floor so I don’t have to worry about the weight of the tanks. I set up the remainder of the fish from moving in my dining room temporarily while I planned out the fish room. I probably went through 10 or 12 different floor plans for what the fish room was going to look like and finally settled on the plan in around May. I wanted the fish room to be one that was easy to work in, organized, and made for breeding fish.

I ended up trashing the acrylic tanks that I made and buying more 10s and 20 longs to go on NSF racks. I would say I built the room to around 40% of where it is today in 2022. I put in a central air pump with 1” PVC looping the whole room. I also hooked up all the lights that I had to breakout blocks with a variable voltage power supply. This allowed all the wiring and air supply to be on the ceiling level, and not cause a tripping hazard in the room. For heating the room, I had a dehumidifier and baseboard heating that was free for me. I honestly have more problems in summer keeping the room cool than keeping it hot in the winter, since the AC unit is in the opposite end of the apartment.

I would say the amount of fish that I bred this year doesn’t reflect just how much work went into the fish room. It really is a proper journey to get everything in the room just how you want. I wouldn’t say I did everything right, but it got me through the year and laid the groundwork for finishing the room in 2023.

Pterophyllum scalare/Phillipine blue angelfish - 2022

I got a group of 6 of these guys around quarter size in 2021 and had them in a 29 gallon tank to grow out. These guys were the meanest fish I had kept so far. I noticed that they had made 2 pairs on either end of the tank and the 2 that were stuck in the middle were missing fins because of the aggression from the pairs. So I ended up moving and selling 4 of them to a store and the one pair would not stop breeding. I had angelfish coming out of my ears. Once they start spawning, I dont think you can stop them. I have had them spawn on 3x12 tiles, on an anubius leaf, on an uplift tube, on a watering spike etc. I eventually got rid of them because I didn’t want my fishroom to turn into an angelfish room. I raised the fry on BBS and then vibra bites and the parents successful spawns were done in RODI water. I raised the fry in hard water after a month-ish with the parents. I have found this to be the most efficient for soft water species because the eggs aren’t fertile in hard water but hard water is what comes out of my tap.

Ancistrus sp./Bristlenose Pleco - 2022

TLDR: Stick a pair in a tank with a cave
For bristlenose plecos, I bought a group of 6 around 1-1.5” in length and grew them up for around a year before they bred for me. I had them in a 20 gallon long and put enough caves in the tank so that they didn’t have to fight over limited caves. I have tried pleco caves from the coop and water spikes from amazon and I have yet to have them choose the pleco caves over the water spikes. At this point I have probably spawned close to 1000 bristlenose, with each spawn being anywhere from 50-200 eggs. The only thing that is annoying about them is that raising the fry up to a sellable size sucks without an automatic water change system. I can usually keep around 100 of them in a 10 gallon tank with 50% water changes twice a week but after they get to around 1” in size I move to around 50 fry per 10 gallon tank. Its a chore but I really do like spawning them. 

My method for hatching the fry is to take out the cave with the male that guards the eggs and move it into an empty 10 gallon tank and wait until the fry all leave the cave. This usually takes about a week for the fry to hatch and use up their yolk sac. I have tried to keep the fry with the parents, but with only a 20 gallon tank, it becomes a problem trying to catch them and keep up with water changes. I have also noticed that if there are fry in the tank, the plecos don’t tend to spawn again until they are gone. When these guys are really going, I can get a spawn ever month, but I usually stop them after a while by not changing water as often.
The variations that I have done are common color, albino, super red, lemon blue eye, and super white. I have noticed that the common color and albino ones have larger spawns and the lemon blue eyes have smaller spawns. Not sure if that is just my fish specifically or an overall trend.

For the fry, I fed them green beans in the beginning but have moved to feeding them Purina Aquamax Fingerling Starter 300. I just got tired of opening so many green bean cans. I do have to be careful with how much I feed with the 300 because it will foul the water much faster and I have lost entire spawns.

I also want to mention that these fish are what I would consider a utility fish. I use them to clean that glass on all my grow out tanks and they will eat extra food since I feed pretty heavily. I think that if anyone has a fish room should breed these guys because they make maintenance easier.
 

Edited April 26 by Phirefase