A new discovery today

[gwrace]

I was doing my weekly tank maintenance and discovered my pair of albino bushy nose plecos had left me a present. Their first spawn. Inside their secret castle was a large group of free swimming babies. I counted to 50 and then lost track. Since this was in a community tank with Angels I removed the castle and transferred them to a separate tank. We received this pair as freebies with our first order of Angels about 18 months ago. They were only about half inch in length. The mail is now almost 4 inches long and the female about 3 inches. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with so many babies. I keep a pair of these plecos in each of my 75 gallon tanks and they do a great job of tank cleanup.

[Disgirl]

How exciting!!! Best of luck with the family of plecos. I would love to see that myself in one of my tanks. Maybe someday...
Barb

[vera]

WOW
thats a great news !! i love Albino BN , surely u'll find no problem selling them -they r very desirable and good at keeping tanks spotless
GL

[gwrace]

This was a busy week for us on the animal front. Our pair of Bearded Dragons also decided it was a great time for a gift and left us 30 eggs. We've had this pair for about 2 years and received them when they were only about 5 inches long. This is their first attempt at re-producing. Hopefully I'll know how successful they were in a couple of weeks.

[kaceyo]

Congrats on all the procreating going on at your place. Hope it keeps working for ya.

[fishhead123]

wow, that's lucky! I don't even know how to sex them.

[Apistomaster]

Wow, your animals are certainly being fruitful and multiplying. I didn't realize bearded dragons could produce so many eggs. That has to be an interesting project.
I dabbled in reptiles when I was young but my brother became known as "Snakeman" around here. he had an 8 ft terrarium landscaped to mic desert conditions and at times he had over a dozen pacific Rattlesnakes. I watched them do their courtship and male rivalry dance many times. Rattlesnakes are live bearers and one of his large females produced a clutch of about 14, 8 inch long babies which was pretty cool.

Long before that when we were still kids he had a big female Garter Snake bear about 27 young snakes. What we discovered quite by accident was that young Garter Snakes learned quickly to eat the thawed beef heart blend i made for my Discus. Seeing little snakes eating food from a dish is quite a site. They would enter a feeding frenzy where sometimes one snake would latch on to a sibling and attempt to eat it but that was too much for them to pull off.

My old time friend and fellow fish keeper calls Bushy Nose Plecos "Guppyostomus" and the name has stuck. I gave him some young produced from a cross between a normal and an albino Bushy Nose, These breeders produce about 25% albinos and 75% normal phenotypes but 2/3 of the normals also carry the recessive albino gene. He keeps a pretty good balance with the LFS he accumulates through his trading his Bushy Noses for store credit. The albinos still fetch the higher price and I think of all the different albino fish it is only in the Bushy Noses that it is an improvement. They are hardy like the normal color. I find the Albino Longfin Busht Nose I sometimes raise are not nearly as sturdy and vigorous as the normal fin Albino BN so I don't encourage mine to breed.
I have actually gone out of my way to prevent unwanted broods of Bushy Noses but I do like to have them in most of my tanks for their algae eating attributes.
I have learned that adult Discus love to eat very young BN fry or helpless larvae before the catfishes armor has had time to harden.
I had a large trio of albino Bushy Nose which got into a rhythm where each female would spawn right after the other so I would get about 200 fry emerging at the same time. Those became Discus treats regularly like this single batch did. Look at how many there are.

[fromthelbc]

i counted 100+, congrats!

[dark_spell]

thats awesome! you can sell them and keep 1/2 for yourself

[azpunisher24]

i love plecos lol