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Well after years of trying I finally got a spawn. For how inexpensive
this species is, it sure was a long time coming. Here's a couple shots.

Congrats and well done.Great photo of the parent and babies

very cool! great pics! love the little replicas!!

Congratulations. They are inexpensive because there is plenty of them in the wild and they are durable in shipping/shops, so not many losses. And of course, they aren't the most contrasty and "splashy" as some of their competitors. This combination leads to low prices.

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Mats

Well Done!
Can you elaborate on "years of trying"?? David

Very nice.

How did you trigger them?

Doesn't it take more than 4 days to get from egg-laying to fry? Or do I have the timing wrong?

And my RO water changes -> neglect certainly didn't work. ;)

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Mats

I'm not "jumping" you for trying your best - just trying to understand the circumstances as best as I can.

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Mats

my clowns seem to have no interest in pro creating. even tho the cories in there spawn like the dickens.

maybe i have two same sex. lol or maybe cause i only have two.

love the clowns.

That sounds a bit as I would have thourght.

Seems like a fake dry season is the way to trigger the panaques. But im a bit suprised by the fact that they have spawned in a rock cave and not a wooden cave.

I hope it will work for my blue eye panaques too.

Just goes to show that if the fish feel ready to breed, the material of the cave isn't critical - getting the fish into breeding mood IS critical [and possibly much harder than replacing a cave with one of a different material].

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Mats

Hi Jackster,
Since these are a small and inexpensive species I know a lot of people try to breed Panaque maccus but all things considered, getting them to spawn is actually rather rare,
I know MatsP has had high hopes for his group and years of trying still haven't paid off.
It is hard to understand why they are not as easily bred as many more expensive species kept by fewer people.

I know I practice benign neglect of my Peckoltia L134's but since mine seem to have a definite spawning season, I take the neglect much further. I barely take care of mine from Sept 1st then begin making large RO water changes a few weeks before mine usually begin to spawn which is about March 1st and ends September 1st. There is a +/- two weeks at either side of the dates given. Outside of spawning season I keep them in tap water which has a pH of 7.4 and the TDS is 340 to 450 ppm depending on how often I change their water. A couple weeks of not making a water change isn't enough "neglect" to have any affect on them. During their spawning season I keep them in very different conditions and I feed them much better, I lower the TDS down to a range of 40 to 70 ppm. The pH drops on it's own to slightly acidic, 6.2 to 6.6 due the drastically lower buffering capacity.

Your fry have nice markings; the pleco fry often are more attractive than their parent among many of the Hypancistrus and Peckoltia spp. You probably won't need much help carrying your bags of P. maccus money to the bank but it is a nice feather in your pleco breeding cap. I never tried to breed them but I thought I gave my old Panaque L204 a serious try. That Panaque are not an easy genus to spawn was my final conclusion after trying to breed L204 for a couple of years.
I think it will be a long time before someone documents an aquarium spawn of Blue Eye Panaque. I know someone from Venezuela who tried breeding them down there in a flow through pool large enough to contain stumps. Uaru fernandopeyzi and even Pterophyllum altum bred in this large, simulated biotope but they never managed to breed their Blue Eye Panaque. They had the type found in the Lake Maracaibo basin. I think Panaque spp are hard nuts to crack and the larger the species, the greater the challenge. As if breeding the little P. maccus wasn't already hard enough.

I think one of the difficulties in breeding these fish is that we don't really know enough about them. Perhaps it's the food they need that is different? I'm not at all sure...

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Mats

I tend to agree with you on that, Mats.
Some commonly imported, small and fairly cheap species like Panaque maccus may be more specialized than we currently are aware of.

very thought provoking points...congrats on the spawn by the way!

They may just need some other triggers than other plecos.

Andersp90 wrote:They may just need some other triggers than other plecos.

Quite. It's just that we don't know WHAT those triggers might be - at least I don't.

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Mats

Since it could be dietary could it come back to the species of wood being used? Is there any study as to what species of wood any of them prefer in the wild over others? I've always based it on the hardness of the wood but maybe there is more to it than that. Maybe they prefer a sappy wood that most of us stay away from or something. Just a thought.

I've had a great deal of difficulty with Panaque myself with 0 success so far and a lot of years of trying.

I'm pretty sure the type of wood isn't TERRIBLY important. But there may be other things, such as seeds, insects, fresh leaves/grass/stems that become available in the wet season.

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Mats

One of my forays into evolutionary biology sees the Panaque dentition and digestive system as something like combining the reasons why Wood Peckers Peck wood and Termites digest wood. I don't think the type of wood is as important as how rich a feeding ground some pieces of wood support. It seems very likely to me that Panaque prefer older wood most colonized or rather utilized by algae/diatoms(periphytons) and aquatic insect larvae than the types of barren, hard wood we find holds up best in our aquariums.

Many plecos are best adapted to scour rocks but they do not eat the rocks. They eat the periphyton and aquatic insect larvae living on the rocks.
Some only eat a little of the periphyton community in their search for the higher protein insect larvae. Other plecos eat mostly the periphyton and aquatic insects are more incidentally consumed.

It takes many variations of different strategies for so many of the fish we collectively call "Plecos" to have such high diversity within a fairly narrow riverine habitat.
These Loricariidae come in every size from miniature 2 cm species to meter long and everything in between and adapted to specialize in every possible microhabitat imaginable.

Wood probably doesn't last long in neotropical rivers unlike the wood retrieved from peat bogs that we frequently use as aquarium furnishings.
I use a lot of naturally occurring river drift wood I can collect because I think it is the closest I can find to what might be found in neotropical rivers. I am fortunate to be where finding pretty clean wood and rivers are so close. I know that there are many polluted rivers in other areas where I would never consider using any of the wood from them and would restrict my sources to those who have good drift wood for sale or use some of the bog wood sold at most well stocked shops. My point is re Panaque spp is that they are probably looking for wood well colonized by aquatic organisms and they have evolved specialized dentition which allows them to extract the more deeply buried bugs and have digestive systems which probably rely on symbiotic microorganisms as termites do to digest much of the wood they happen to eat as their means of digesting cellulose rather than let this additional energy source go to waste.

apistomaster wrote:Outside of spawning season I keep them in tap water which has a pH
of 7.4 and the TDS is 340 to 450 ppm depending on how often I change their water.

These are very realistic TDS numbers (for my tanks also) and I think a lot of people won't
give you an accurate information when it comes to TDS.

apistomaster wrote:You probably won't need much help carrying your bags of
P. maccus money to the bank but it is a nice feather in your pl*co breeding cap.

That's a really funny comment and pretty much fits my exact thoughts on the matter.

MatsP wrote:

Andersp90 wrote:They may just need some other triggers than other plecos.

Quite. It's just that we don't know WHAT those triggers might be - at least I don't.

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Mats

True.

I still think that a fake dry season would be a good place to start. No water changes for 3 weeks, mabye even turn the pumps off. The temp should be kept high, 29-30. After the 3 weeks, cold rain or RO water is added with a 30% change ones a day.

Works for some hard-to-breed corys.

Jackster wrote:

apistomaster wrote:Outside of spawning season I keep them in tap water which has a pH
of 7.4 and the TDS is 340 to 450 ppm depending on how often I change their water.

JACKSTER WROTE:
"These are very realistic TDS numbers (for my tanks also) and I think a lot of people won't
give you an accurate information when it comes to TDS."

I have been able to breed wild Blue and Brown in the surface water supplied sources used in our sister city, Lewiston, Idaho where the pH is usually 7.6 and the TDS is closer to 600 ppm TDS. Our water is from an ancient aquifer over 300 feet deep and runs a little softer.
The Discus people have trouble believing my numbers but the Blue/brown Discus, Symphysodon haraldi is the most adaptable to a wider range of water chemistries than either the Green Discus, S. aequifasciatus or the Heckel Discus, S. discus.
My very best haul from any pair of Discus was from a pair of wild browns in a 125 gal by themselves but in much harder and alkaline than most believe is possible. In one single spawn, I raised 147 fry to one inch before removing them from their breeding tank and watching a pair of wilds taking care of so many large fry is a sight I have never been able to repeat nor will ever forget. The stars were just lined up right. It was in the Age of Aquarius, after all, so maybe that is why their brood turned out so well? I have had many larger sized egg clutches since then but none that ever produced that many surviving fry. It was one of my personally most satisfying experiences as a tropical fish breeder. Reminiscing aside, I don't know why anyone would bother not sharing accurate chemical information. There is so much more to breeding fish than the exact pH and hardness. Experience can only be shared but learning requires actually doing.

If the little Panaque maccus was an expensive species, I am sure by now a fairly reliable "recipe" for breeding them would be well known by now. Less expensive species often require serious study before breeding them becomes routine. For another example, only a few ever breed any of the common Otocinclus compared to the vast numbers of those who keep large groups of them in their high tech aquatic garden tanks. Perhaps if these high tech aquatic gardens only contained Otocinclus schools we would hear of far more successful breeding accounts. Choose your few most favorites but infrequently bred species and apply yourself and many will no longer be such mysterious species to breed.
All you have to do is learn how to think like a fish.

Hi all,
There was some work on Panaque nutrition and xylophagy by Dr Donovan German, and I think we had a thread about it? Any way I had some further correspondence with him and this is his summary

So, just to summarize what I think these fish are doing… the wood-eating catfishes dig into decaying wood and efficiently digest wood degradation products that environmental microbes are making available as they degrade wood. The fish also have elevated digestive enzyme activities (e.g., N-acetyl-b-D-glucosaminidase) suggestive that they digest fungi within the wood matrix. Thus, they likely get “energy” from the degraded wood. The stable isotopic signatures (carbon and nitrogen) of wild-caught wood-eating catfishes certainly suggest that they get their protein from fungi and amorphous detritus, and we find periphyton and amorphous detritus in their guts (in addition to the wood; see the “inside the guts” paper where I do a detailed gut content analysis of wild-caught fish). Basically, the fish have to get their nitrogen from somewhere other than the wood detritus (there isn’t much N in wood anyway). The fish certainly ingest wood, they just don’t use the same “pathway” to obtain energy from it as a termite. Rather than harbouring an endosymbiotic community, they let the microbes in the environment do the work for them. This may be a function of living in an aquatic environment"

So I think the answer is to offer the Panaques wood that is soft and showing signs of fungal actitivy, and to supplement their diet with a protein/carbohydrate supplement, Sweet Potato would probably be my first choice for this.

cheers Darrel

The species look so much alike it's easy to misidentify. Makes you wander if it's not one and the same species.

Kudows on your breeding effort. I have 4 of them, wich ever of the two species they ultimately may be. I hope in the future to breed them as well. I really like them, they are a beautiful little fish.