what do you do with your babies?

Bathos · Post by **Bathos** » 17 Mar 2003, 03:09

what do you do with your fry once you've got them?

i've got about 100 C. aeneus fry at about 3/4 inches each right now, and i'm looking for some options. i can't keep them all. unfortunately, i don't have enough room. so what do you do with the fry you can't keep?

-Liz

Post by **Silurus** » 17 Mar 2003, 03:12

If your LFS is willing to take them, exchange them for something more useful (like cash/other fish/fish food/equipment).

Post by **Dinyar** » 17 Mar 2003, 04:20

Keep the fittest ones for yourself (say 25%). Sell the 50% or so in the middle to an LFS or auction them at a local fish club, or just give them away to your friends. Feed the lowest 25% to your other fish. (In the wild, probably less than 10% would survive. This is what "natural selection" is all about.)

Dinyar

Cory_lover · Post by **Cory_lover** » 17 Mar 2003, 07:16

erm....yeah....keep the few best ones for yourself...and sell or feed the others. Those fry that were aquarium bred/raised are much eaiser for future breeding. Look out for good colouring and good body size, no fin deformity etc.

Sid Guppy · Post by **Sid Guppy** » 17 Mar 2003, 23:13

Be careful with feeding small Cory's to other fish; you wouldn't be the first one to loose a big, nice predator to a tiny 1/2" Cory that got stuck in one's throat with spines locked....

Cory_lover · Post by **Cory_lover** » 18 Mar 2003, 07:29

oh yeah..forgot about that..i would just kill the babies...not feed them..

u can kill them two ways: chuck them on the ground real hard, as this ensures a quick and painless death, or you can just put the babies in a bucket full of ice water.

Good and bad about these two ways: If u chuck'em on the floor, u might not chuck'em hard enough, and they end up severely injured, and very painful, and u have to chuck them again..which seems kind of inhumane.
If u put them in ice water, it may take a little while for them to die of cold...thus the babies will die slowly AND painfully.

Its basicaly your choice tho...

NOTE: DO NOT FLUSH THEM DOWN THE TOILET AS SOME BABIES MIGHT SURVIVE AND CONTAMINATE YOUR LOCAL WATERWAYS!!!!!!!!!!!1

Post by **Silurus** » 18 Mar 2003, 10:18

If u put them in ice water, it may take a little while for them to die of cold...thus the babies will die slowly AND painfully.

Actually, freezing fish is the least painful way to kill them. Because fish are ectothermic, freezing them just lowers their metabolic rate until they die. Sort of like going to sleep... forever.

Cory_lover · Post by **Cory_lover** » 18 Mar 2003, 11:13

but isn't freezing them and putting them in ice water kinda the same becuase if u freeze then, it still takes a while to freeze rite..its not like its an immediate effect??

Post by **Silurus** » 18 Mar 2003, 11:28

Sorry, I wasn't clear on my earlier post. What I meant was putting them in ice water. Youdon't have to wait for water to freeze before they die.

Sid Guppy · Post by **Sid Guppy** » 18 Mar 2003, 14:02

Agreed; that's my method too. Most tropical fish go in torpor once the water dips under say, 10- 14'C. What I do, to finish them off, is put the fish in a bucket with tankwater, with a dark towel over it, and letting it loose temperature (if it's a small fish, even more easy: I use a jar). When it's sufficiently cooled down, I put the bucket/jar in the refridgerator, and after some time; to make sure the fish is fairly motionless, I put the jar in the freezer. Once ice forms; that fish is a goner; you don't have to wait till all the water is frozen.
Dpping a fish straight from 24'C to 0'C is a bit shocky to me. Just take some time to do this; it's the least you can do for the fish.
And I agree with Siluris; fish just go to 'sleep' and never wake....

Bathos · Post by **Bathos** » 18 Mar 2003, 17:43

which fish do you generally euthanize? just the deformed? so far, all of the fry i can see look very healthy. perhaps any deformed fry died early? they're comming up on a month old now. (born feb 27th)

can anyone give me some good tips on selecting the "best" fry? should this selection be done when the fry have the adult coloring? aside from looking for good coloring and checking for deformities, what else should i look for?

thanks for your help thus far. i really appreciate all the tips and advice you've given me, not just in this thread, but in others as well.

-Liz

Sid Guppy · Post by **Sid Guppy** » 18 Mar 2003, 19:17

If the majority of the fry is fine; it seems a shame to me; to 'waste' them, simply because in the wild only few survive. I should invest in gasoline (I assume you have a car....) and sell/trade or give them to all your LFS in the neighbourhood. And any newbie in your vicinity should be happy with a few babies too, I think.
Just finish the sick, malformed and runty ones, and sell/trade/give the rest to others....

I only euthanize fish, that are already dying, or carrying a fatal disease and/or are clearly suffering.
Last one was a Mochokiella, that had a large tumor (Siluris found out it wasn't benign), that fish got thinner and thinner, and it was just laying on the sand, slowly wasting away.
It was a 16-17 year old cat, so understandable, but not one jot easier to do, still.

Antman · Post by **Antman** » 20 Mar 2003, 00:56

I feel it's my duty to step in and dispel this myth about anything flushed down the toilet ever getting into any waterway. In the USA, and I suspect most other industrialized nations, all water that enters the sewage system is treated to remove all solids and bio-materials ("floaters" and fishies alike), and is then disinfected with chlorine before it is ever discharged to a natural waterway. They don't want single-celled bacteria in the discharge, so what they do to get rid of them will surely kill off any fish that might miraculously survive the horrendous water conditions in the sewer. Many communities go even further in treating wastewater, to a point where it is actually cleaner than most potable (tap - for drinking) water.

What you shouldn't do is dump live fish into a storm drain (those drains that are along the curbsides of streets, that handle all the rain)... these drainage systems often DO drain to natural bodies of water with little or no treatment. With that in mind, don't dump your motor oil or other nasties down storm drains either!

Saara · Post by **Saara** » 20 Mar 2003, 13:52

In Finland there has been a lot of talk about using clove oil to kill fish when it is necessary. Some people have used it with good results i.e. seemingly painless death. It can also be used as a fish anaesthetic. The dose to use to kill a fish is larger than that to use to put a fish to sleep and no ethanol is needed when killing a fish. what one should do is to prepare a separete jar of water and clove oil, for example 2 ml of oil and 1.5 l of water, and move the fish to this jar. The water temperature should be over 15 C, preferably 25 C. A warning: clove oil does smell bad and it does not dissolve into water very easily as some people have found out, but it seems to put fish to sleep in less than 10 second and kill them in less than 20 seconds painlessly. I consider it a better way to kill a fish than using icy cold water or other conventional means to do it. Clove oil works by stopping nerval impulses.

what do you do with your babies?

what do you do with your babies?

Toilet flush myth correction