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rowedder
07-14-2008, 08:48 PM
Hello,
I have two day old free swimming fry that are not eating and are swimming like they are drunk. I am artificially raising them, at least trying to anyway. I am feeding them a blend of raw and hard boiled egg yolk with spirulina and baby brine shimp mixed all together. I put a thin bead of this concoction around the bowl and bring the water level up to the formula. I do water changes everytime I feed them and four hours after I feed them when I lower the water to clean off the bead of formula they haven't eaten. I feed the fry three times a day. They were doing good up till this afternoon, don't know what I'm doing different or if I am doing anything different at all. Maybe they never have been eating and are starving. It looked like they were eating. They came up to the food and stayed there awhile. I just don't know. When I saw them swimming in tight circles I did a water change, I didn't notice any difference though afterwards. Any suggestions? I took them away from there parents because the parents already have another spawn and when that happens they eat the babies from the previous spawn. I am thinking about taking the male out this time and letting the female tend to the fry on this spawn. Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

rowedder
07-14-2008, 11:14 PM
UPDATE...
I went home for dinner and found that most of the fry are swimming normal now. My partner changed the water again and cleaned there bowl so I'm sure that helped out a lot. I think the key here is keeping the water clean...

CARY_GLdiscus
07-17-2008, 01:13 PM
:)

kaceyo
07-17-2008, 03:16 PM
Part of keeping the water clean is keeping the bowl itself clean. It would help I think if you just put a smear of yolk mix around the bowl instead of a bead. I also have bowls on the side with yolk dried and ready to go. Keep them in a clean bowl between feedings and a new feed bowl every feeding time.
HTH,

Kacey

CliffsDiscus
07-18-2008, 11:07 AM
Possible a bacterial infection from the egg yolk, use medication and do more waterchanges.

Cliff

rowedder
07-21-2008, 07:30 PM
Hello, I've got five survivors thus far! They look great! There bellies are orange and I moved them into a 2 1/2 gallon tank.

Tropical Haven
07-22-2008, 08:54 AM
Believe it or not the key to keeping baby fry healthy besides feeding them is very good water quality which is done by many large frequent water changes daily.

pug
07-22-2008, 10:47 PM
the very, very best way is to leave it to their parents to feed them with their skin secretion - double size every day!

kaceyo
07-23-2008, 11:22 AM
Hi Pug, and welcome to Simply.
I agree that letting the parents raise the fry gives the best results, but I think everyone should try raising a few spawns artificially for the learning experience alone, if nothing else.
You never know when you'll have a spawn you can't replace and the parents can't or won't raise them. A foster parent would be the next best choice but they aren't always available either.

Kacey

AADiscus
07-23-2008, 03:39 PM
I can see where the fun can be at the artifical raising but I also see where it is a pain also. I would not continue doing anything else for just 5 fry though. It is a waste of time. IMO You are better off with a larger batch. You know now what you need to do and how to do it.

kaceyo
07-23-2008, 04:59 PM
I wouldn't do it for 5 fry either Angela. Too time consuming with little to no payoff.

Kacey

CliffsDiscus
07-24-2008, 02:50 PM
Hello, I've got five survivors thus far! They look great! There bellies are orange and I moved them into a 2 1/2 gallon tank.

Hi Rowedder,
How many fry were there in this batch when you first started?

Cliff

rowedder
07-28-2008, 01:10 PM
Hey All,
Just wanted to let you all know that the 5 fry are still doing well and are growing fast. In the beggining I started out with like 80 or so. I have another spawn on the cone once again.
This past weekend I bought 5 tangerine's from Mac's Discus. They are doing good as well, very pretty.
As for the pay off as mentioned earlier, I understand where your coming from. I am in the experimental stages of all of this so the 5 fry that I have left are my "challenge" to see if I can grow them out. I am very curious to see what they turn out to be. The same parents like I said earlier have laid over a hundred more eggs, I plan on taking those out as well to artifically raise those. The problem happens when the parents lay more eggs about two days after the fry are free swimming and the parents eat all the previous babies up. We'll see what happens.

AADiscus
07-28-2008, 03:09 PM
If you will pull the female when you get wigglers the fry will normally not get eaten. I will tell you from experimenting it works better with more fry because the genetic makeup of the fish is going to show different when you have more fry.

kaceyo
07-28-2008, 04:13 PM
If you will pull the female when you get wigglers the fry will normally not get eaten. I will tell you from experimenting it works better with more fry because the genetic makeup of the fish is going to show different when you have more fry.

This is true in my experience also. A fair amount of egg/wriggler/fry eating can be attributed to one of the parents wanting to spawn again. With only one parent in the tank the drive to spawn is much less.
Same thing with large spawns. They seem to be more satisfied with what they have and are less likely to want to try again.

Kacey

rowedder
10-11-2008, 12:01 AM
FYI... Everything is fine now LOL , thanks for all your guy's support.