Hi, I have had about 4 batches of eggs from mu BN pair....the eggs hatch well, go brown, consume their sacs, grow a bit - then about when 4 weeks old they all start to die off one by one...
Water is low in nitrates (no nitrites or ammonia) ph is about 7.2 ish and temp varied with each batch between 76 and 82. I fed them granulated Tetra prima , cucumber and algae wafers.
The current batch seem to have a white spot on their underside or sometimes two. If this is whitespot...what has caused it and how do I treat it on fry?
I really don't want to lose this batch..there's easily over a hundred fry!!
The usual cause of losses of bristlenose fry (or most other fry, for that matter) is lack of or wrong type of food. So, what are you feeding them?
Also, what is your routine for bringing them up in general - do you move them out of the parent's tank, if so when. Any other info about the care you can give is probably also helpful.
we have tried leaving them with Daddy until free swimming....using a frysaver with an airstone and it's own pumped flow from main tank....using their own seperate tank from hatching...
Foodwise- cucumber, finely ground Tetra prima and algae wafers.
The current batch were removed from Daddies cave, hatched in fry saver in adult tank, and now released into main tank (parents removed).
I would stay off the Tetra Prima - it's a bit rich for small bristlenoses - I've certainly had bad experience with this, and several others have said similar things [but now that I've said that, someone will undoubtedly come forward and say something like "I feed 90% tetra prima to my bristlenose fry, and get 100% survival rate" - this always happens when I say something concrete....]
I would also try some courgette (zucchini on the other side of the Atlantic) instead of cucumber - the first week or so, you may need to boil it a tiny bit (just enough to make it a tiny bit soft - it should still be a bit crunch, not "mush").
I feed my fry almost solely on JBL Pleco tablets - however, I have no intention to achieve 100% survival rate, and I'm lazy when it comes to feeding bristlenose fry - I can't cope with the numbers I _DO_ get, so I don't see the point in trying to get better survival rate. So far, since about August or so, I've delivered about 90 bristlenoses to my local shops. I get little or nothing for them, but I can't just let them flood into every tank I own - I have 12 tanks, and I only have bristlenoses [1] in four of them (about 800 liters of nominal volume in all) - plus two keeping the filter in the hospital tank cycled.
[1] On purpose - I have at two more or three tanks with bristlenoses that have "escaped" from their home tank. Second to last time I delivered some bristlenoses to the LFS, I took 12 fish out of three tanks that shouldn't have any bristlenoses in them...
As a first food i tend to use blanched celery, but with the massive increase in bioload careful attention needs to be paid to the nitrate levels which can explode if water conditions are monitored closely
Lou: Every young man's fantasy is to have a three-way. Jacob: Yeah not with another fu**!ng guy! Lou: It's still a three-way!
I kept mine at 80-82 degrees. Species only tank. Left fry with dad. Covered intakes.
Extra filtration, if any filters get clogged up or slow down, fry climb to the top I have noticed so keep on top of the filtration.
Veggies, romaine lettuce, fruit, sinking wafers, sinking granules, NLS Grow . Mine mostly ate romaine lettuce, devoured it, zuchinni, cucumber, sweet bell pepper strips, sinking food, small enough for them or that gets soft for them to much on, sinking algae wafers sinking veggie rounds. sinkign earthworm sticks, sinking spirulina sticks etc, some defrosted frozen.
They eat non stop , so feed well and clean tank very weel. keep up on your filters and tubing, feed them take it out change water feed them take it out change water over and over and over.
White grains sounds very much like Ich (whitespot). a standard med from your lfs will take care of it but fry are not as hardy as mature fish, so things might not go as you'd like. Whitespot is evident in most tank water but only stressed or unhealthy fish start to suffer from it - maybe the fry move stressed them. I always leave my fry in with the parents, (& previous generations) & don't have any problems. It would be wise to up the temp when treating.
Lou: Every young man's fantasy is to have a three-way. Jacob: Yeah not with another fu**!ng guy! Lou: It's still a three-way!
At least with bristlenose you know that they'll spawn again pretty soon. As Richard B says, you'll never convincingly wipe out whitespot, and for that reason I never treat it, but in 9 tanks have only had one outbreak in the last 2.5 years- it went through one cycle then didn't come back, but the cysts will still be there next time my quality goes to hell.
Mats might be right with Tetra Prima- I haven't used this myself, but I try to avoid using too much really protein-rich food, as bristlenose tend to target-feed on this rather than what they should be eating! I do use a very few JMB catfish pellets which are quite rich in protein, and also feed flake (mainly because I've got endlers and black-bellied limias in the same tank), in addition to spirulina granules (which, like algae wafers, are also more protein-rich than is ideal, but are small enough to spread around the tank), cucumber and courgette. Like Mats, I'm not too concerned with survival rates as I struggle to get rid of the fry in the quantities produced (I sold over 300 fry from a single pair last year, but they probably produced over double that), but I've noticed that survival rates vary tremendously- if they get through the first 3 weeks of free-swimming virtually none die, but I've had big losses in that first period and also had nearly 100% survival rates, without really changing anything. I've also not noticed much difference in growth rate between leaving them in with their parents or transferring them to grow-out tanks, so I'd be inclined to leave them with their parents next time- the adults are astonishingly tolerant of fry competing for food (and large fry from previous batches also seem to be very tolerant of small fry- they only seem to compete when their sizes are broadly similar).
In large tanks they don't seem to need much vegetable matter- I've also got fry from sons and daughters of my original pair that I've never seen touch vegetables, but had almost the same growth rates as in my other tanks. They may get much more natural algae in that tank, I'm not sure.
The fry are being moved to the frysaver as eggs..and these white grains are becoming visible within days. What could be stressing them out at this early stage? Light, heat...any suggestions? The parents were in this tank , and they showed no signs of whitespots/grains.
Are there any other ways of curing ich without chemicals...or can it go away on it's own?(or am I dreaming?!!)
fishy knickers wrote:Are there any other ways of curing ich without chemicals...or can it go away on it's own?(or am I dreaming?!!)
Not really - as in, any cure that doesn't involve SOME sort of chemical alteration to the water is unlikely to kill the parasite that causes Ich on the fish (even the medications we use do not fix the infestation at the fish, it kills the freeswimming parasite before it can attach itself to the fish the next time around). Now, there are different cures for ich - one is to raise the temperature over a certain point (I think it's 32'C - which is quite warm for the fish!), another involves adding a fair amount of salt to the tank. Or you can add various chemical treatments available in your LFS under a large number of different brand names. Like with all cures, it's likely that if it's going to have some real effect, it also has some side-effects. High temperature isn't good for the fish, and salt or chemicals affect the fish in various ways which isn't great for them either. We are not talking about something like "one ibuprofen" for a human here, these are stronger stuff.
It MAY go away on it's own in adult fish, if you can make sure the fish are happy, healthy and stress-free. Just like humans, fish catch disease when they are not on top form.
I'm currently battling white-spot in one of my tanks, and I'm using Waterlife Protozin, but there are many other medications that are OK for catfish. Read the label, and if it's saying "use a lower dose for catfish" or "use lower dose for scaleless fish", then do so.
fishy knickers wrote:The fry are being moved to the frysaver as eggs..and these white grains are becoming visible within days.
Pictures would help diagnose this. Personally, I leave eggs and fry for dad to care for, dad will clean them well and make sure they hatch. Once they leave the cave, the fry are happy to eat spinach leaves, zucchini(Courgette) and algae pellets. If this is ich/whitespot, you'll need to treat the entire tank. But if fry are days old with this I doubt it's ich/whitespot and I doubt you'll save them if it is. The main cause of ich/whitespot is stressed fish, whether by tank conditions, shipping, whatever. Good clean water prevents it more than anything else.
Hi, There's no problem hatching them..99% hatchrate from each batch so far. I can't seem to catch one of the fry with the "grain/spots" on camera. The ones that do have the spots only seem to have one- and they seem quite prominent...and almost as if they are growing with the fry?! This batch seem to be doing better, we are now using RO to be on the safe side (10% daily change). I'm not sure if it's whitespot anymore...as the water is really good, low lighting,lots of bogwood, lots of food, lots of aeration etc...
I have no idea what the white marks are - you would have to get a photo for us to have an idea of how to diagnose it.
Be careful with too much RO water - your pH may drop, and with that the water quality can go down the drain - when I started using RO water, I lost a fair few Ancistrus because I lost TOO much of the KH buffer in the water - you can either mix part tap and part RO water, or use a KH buffer (TMC's Re-mineralize is a product I use for this purpose). And they are NOT sensitive to bad water quality - not compared to most other plecos at least. It is obviously a relative matter.
Since my last post in that thread I have: changed the flow of the Aquaclear HOB filter (size 30) from max to min, siphoned up some of the Hikari Algea wafers I have put in there (still some remnants/pieces left), reduced the bubble flow of the bubble wand and increased it in the in-tank bubble filter (lee's tripple flow) and added romaine.
Also, dad was removed when the fry's egg sac was nearly gone.
I always used liquifry number 3 to start my hatchlings off once they had fully absorbed their yolk, then after a few days onto some courgette it has far more nutrition than cucumber as that is mostly water.
IMO, a 10 gallon aquarium just isn't big enough for the volume of food those fry can be going through. Definitely turn the filtration back up. More is better. Dad is no danger to the fry, btw.
