Apistogramma hongsloi "project"

[solasis]

Pair #2... really hoping she's a she.

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Pair #3's male (and his female behind him), he's colored up a lot since I got the pairs divided. Hopefully he continues to do so.

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Water changes with RO tonight to get TDS down. I'm in uncharted territory for me as I've never done anything like that with my water. TDS might still be a bit high. Got the RO going again and might do a bit more changing tomorrow to get them down a bit more. Ran out of RO on the bigger tank, which was expected.

These fish seem to love cold, RO water changes. My apistogramma allpahuayo is ready to spawn. I dropped TDS from 100 -> 50 and temp from 80 -> 70 and hoping for eggs in the morning. Female turned bright yellow indicating she is ready for lay.

[jwcarlson]

The one pair that's already spawned for me, the female is yellow every morning. I will probably do another change tonight with RO on them to drop them from about 120 down to the 50ish range TDS. I'd like to prove that they can breed period before I start seeing how hard they can go. I guess I should have taken a bit more water out last night, but that's OK. Hoping to pick up another bigger barrel on Friday so that I have more flexability with RO. Right now I just have a 32 gallon trash can and it's partially full, so I'm worried if I leave it on when I go to work for 10+ hours that I'll come back to it spilling "valuable" water on the floor.

I haven't set up my solenoids yet, when I do that I'll be able to turn the RO on/off from my phone (or automatically, once I know about how long I should leave it on the fill the barrrel mostly).

[jwcarlson]

Dropped TDS to 60 for the last few days. We were out late at a work dinner so I didn't get to observe last night. This morning I could not find the female, finally saw a little shadow in her cave. She finally came out, has been kind of keeping the male away. And has been darting back to the cave and immediately turning over looking at the top and spitting water towards the top.

Guess I will know soon if she starts tossing them out. Not sure how to know if the male did his job or not.

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[jwcarlson]

The kids have taken to calling her "Bee" because of her colors. I do not know what they're going to do if/when the other two females spawn and have the same coloration. But that will be for them to find out.
In any event, the last few days Bee has been keeping her male on his half of the tank. She's not being too rough on him, but does check to make sure he's not getting too close. In the picture above she had one egg spit out and I didn't notice it until a couple of days later. Yesterday afternoon she had spit 3-4 more out, watched her eat a couple of those.
When she zips back into the cave now she's going almost vertical and making a lot of spitting motions. I'm hoping that she is moving wigglers around. I did a really quick vac yesterday just to get some of the puddles of baby brine shrimp out of there.

Excited to see if she's got anything in there. I did notice that she's missing her right ventral fin. Hoping that's a battle injury (she didn't have it when she came from the supplier) and not a sign of inbreeding. Though I have read that fry can rub their ventral fins off sometimes because they slide around on substrate. Guess we'll see how her fry turn out if she makes any.

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