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one of the dads went to get a bite to eat so here goes





I do not know where the loose ones went?

one male came right back







one male in and one male digging under, that's my small boy, I think? I call him Digger..but unknown for sure if that's him



one female in the middle of food

well when i left for work at 1630 there were many hatched wiggly bn babies with egg sacs on in the back of the cave, now its empty i think. no male no babies. Do not see them anywhere?

still no sign of them anywhere.

maybe he moved them? I mean they could be anywhere there is so much driftwood and plants. I will keep the sponge on the intake just in case they are alive somewhere.

sigh...

I'm not sure it's much point in fretting over them. I'm sure they will breed again. It often takes a couple of "tries" before dad gets the hang of it. It may help if you have only one male in the tank, as then the male doesn't have to split his time between looking after the fry and dealing with a rival.

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Mats

so the other males were not helping him they were interfering with him?

do you think they are all gone away or just hidden away in the tank? they were hatched and everything?
I won't fret over it I am just curious.

I could move the other two males to other tanks no prob with that, but then I 'd have only 2 girls and 1 male in the 40 gal. I guess that is ok.

I'm sure one male and two females is sufficient to keep a 40g tank clean. I think I have about 5 in a 100g tank, and there's no algae problem in that tank.

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Mats

no, I am not worried about cleanliness, i mean there are no other occupants in there at all besides them. It will be so empty. lol

I like species only tanks.

andywoolloo wrote:no, I am not worried about cleanliness, i mean there are no other occupants in there at all besides them. It will be so empty. lol

I like species only tanks.

Well, you could of course add some completely different fish just to keep the tank filled with fish - or wait a bit and you'll have my problem of having a tank full of bristlenose babies and juveniles...

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Mats

i'd like to wait and have it full of babies!

MatsP wrote:I'm sure one male and two females is sufficient to keep a 40g tank clean. I think I have about 5 in a 100g tank, and there's no algae problem in that tank.

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Mats

I just use one each large adult male Ancistrus cf cirrhosus in my 75 and 125 gal discus display tanks and they do an adequate job of controlling all the edible algae off the glass walls and wood. I chose males to avoid unwanted breeding.

apistomaster wrote:I just use one each large adult male ... I chose males to avoid unwanted breeding.

<Pedantic nitpick>Ehm, if there is just ONE fish, is there any risk of unwanted breeding?</Pedantic nitpick> ;)

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Mats

ok it's been many days since I saw the babies, but not I see three! with small egg sacs still attached, bright orange yellow ones, they , the actual BN fry, are no longer white, they are like black and white mottled!

Unknown how they can get around with that egg yolk on them. Maybe they just go where the current brings them? Maybe there is more in there somewhere!!

I have half a dozen ABN's in a 20 with a good sized chunk of lace rock and a similar sized piece of bogwood, and just this past weekend they spawned for the first time. I placed a ceramic burrito at one end and lo and behold the big boy is in like Flynn, I "thought" he was just checking out the new real estate.

I was away for the weekend and came home to what looked like golden colored snails all over one end of the tank, my initial thought was oh crud what now? Then on further investigation I realized they were wrigglers! Yeeha! Probably 35 - 50 of them. I checked out the burrito and found he has another clutch in there that is as big if not bigger. I am guessing this is the result of two different females.

There was no sign of any breeding activity before placing the burrito in there, is it possible he just preferred a solid bottom to where he took up residence? I did not see any signs of digging as mentioned earlier in this thread.

Steve

The choice of a spawning site seems to be a pretty complex set of "rules", so giving the fish several options is generally a good idea.

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Mats

After work just now found 4 upon cleaning the substrate! 3 on the tank walls and one on a cave! Oh and one in the bucket as I was dumping it out in the sink which i saved. I can't even believe it! They are so small and still have some egg yolk on them!

of course stupidly in my excitement I opened the baby artemia can and squirted some in the tank and then I realized I do not need to feed them till the egg yolk is gone! Now it's only good for 6 weeks from today and I need to order more!

I thought they would be bigger... they are so minute! jamming all over and they are very fast!

Just found more on the sponge over the intake. wow.

So I first saw the eggs on 111608 and 5 or 4 days later they hatched so the 21st and now its the 28th and the egg yolk lasts 2 weeks? they aren't very big at all?

oh! And congrats Steve!!

ok egg yolk is gone and they are about a little over 1/2 " long. it is hard to see them when I clean the substrate and do water changes. I have to have someone else peering into the tank from the side to help me not get them. So it's a two person job now!! sometimes three!!

I only see about 4 out and about but some more were observed in a crannie under the driftwood beign babysat by the big daddy BN.

This morning 3 were on the romaine lettuce. I have been adding NLS grow and baby brine shrimp with a medicine dropper, artemia or something.

The first time mine spawned (the thread is there somewhere but way buried by now!), I initially only saw one fry, then 11 the next day, and by the time a week had passed there were 50... The male looked after them for about 3 weeks before they were allowed out though, so they were 1/2" long and showing no sign of a yolk sac before I saw them at all. I started with a 2 F/1 M trio, but they were spawning so often I passed on a female to a colleague who's female had recently died, and the rate of reproduction has slowed right down. Despite selling 130 this year I've still got about 100 left though...

The adults are the only fish I've got which come out of hiding when I stick my hands in the tank rather than the other way round- they assume I'm putting courgette/cucumber in and so try and grab anything they find (usually my fingers). Despite what look like well-developed eyes they seem to have awful eyesight, and seem to use their tail as the main source of identifying large items of food.

so he may still be hiding them somewhere? cause i have only seen 3 or one on a continual basis and I haven't wanted to disturb them by checking all over in there.

thanks, we'll see what happens. I am fine with 1-3 or however many come out one day! The few that were out have no more yolk sac as of yesterday or the day before.

o.k., i continually see one albino baby and one regular coloured baby. They are minature replicas of their parents. My question is, since they stay on the tank walls or on the plant leaves how are they going to get to the food?

I add baby brine shrimp and hikari firt bites powder, the tank also obviously has the food for the adults, sinking tabs and fruit and veg and romaine lettuce but the two babies are continually on the tank walls or the plant leaves?

Most likely, the babies are getting enough food from the surrounding environment - they will eat hikari wafers tho and anything else the parents eat, but the first few days, they aren't that great at eating.

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Mats

saw two on the romaine lettuce early this morning!

well here are some not so good pics, baby on the glass with yolk sac last week. my camara wants to focus behind him.





and this afternoon, baby on cuke and baby on glass. you can barely see him on the cuke, see where the fork goes in and then the right edge of the fork look up, he is along the green edge of the cuke.



isn't he a beauty!!

Your camera may not work any better if you try this, but it could: Move away a little bit from the tank, and see if you can get a sharp shot of the baby itself - then cut out all the junk that got in because you moved away, and you end up with a small, but sharp image - that of course also assumes that you have a reasonable number of megapixels, but a 4MP camera should be able to give you a decent size image even after a bit of cutting out the middle of the picture. [What I'm thinking of is something like "try to take your own passport photo using the 1hr lab at Walmart", so you take a large picture, then cut out the middle bit that is your face].

If you don't know much about photo editing and don't have PhotoShop or something like that, you can download an application called IrfanView - it's pretty basic, but has a lot of the functions you find in the pay-for versions from Adobe etc. And it's much quicker to load and run than PhotoShop. It has the ability to "crop" the picture to the size you want.

And yes, I'm sure the baby is very cute.

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Mats

thank you Mats! I do have corel paint shop pro photo XI , i will try to maniuplate it in there!
my camara is a canon power shot 5.0 pixels.

I have a little trick that works for me in a case like this, my point and shoot will auto focus if I hold the shutter button half down.
I will focus on something in the tank...then back off the same distance from the baby on the glass, finish depressing the shutter button and then "hopefully" the baby will be in focus. Certainly not an exact art. Mine has macro and super macro modes, I always use the latter.

Birger, that is also a great trick.

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Mats

yes, i will try that also!!

just an update, stil one baby alive and doing well, growing by leaps and bounds, well he/she is probably about 1.5 "s I guess. Eatng all the time, managing to stay away from the gravel vac at all times. I never saw the others after they left the cave. Last time I had seen them in there with egg sacs they were all wriggling away in the back of the cave, then one day all gone. Then about a week or some later the one survivor appeared.

And tonight when I came home from work, one of the adults, or two I reckon, decided to lay another clutch of eggs, not in the driftwood or in a cave but right out in the open on the black sand. A big clump of eggs. No one fanning or guarding..just eggs.

If the eggs are out in the open, I'd suggest you put them in a net with an air-stone on very gentle flow.

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Mats