Not all fries are attaching themselves to parents

[hanleong]

It's not an uncommon issue here but it have happened to my few pairs severals times that I need to know if I have missed out any necessary steps to make it right..

At this moment, I have my **very** favourite leopard pair having a spawn and there are already about 150 wigglers and except about 20 of them, the rest are not attaching themselves to the parents.

the more unusual part about this batch of fries is that they still look healthy 4 days after free-swimming, crowding around at a corner (for my other pairs, their unattached fries just died off on the 2nd day).. upon very close inspection, I realised that some of these fries are swimming to their parents' bodies, take a few bites and swim back to the corner!

However, I can sense that the parents are losing their paitence and I certainly didn't hope the parents will give up on the fries (they do seem like a responsible pair with darker bodies)

Please give your advice

**I have already done the following
1) remove the dark sponge, so that the fries will not attached to it
2) lowered the water level to 2/3
3) didn't dare to on the lights
4) always leave a room light on thru the night
5) do a 10-15% water change everyday
6) as it's raining here everyday, I have a heater set to 28 degrees

:-[

[jason87]

interesting and funny. haha. anybody knows can help?

[Carol_Roberts]

It sounds like you have taken all the right steps. Get the bbs hatching - if they are 4 days old now they should be able to eat it soon. Have a divider handy in case the parents want to spawn again.

[MonkeeFish]

after how long do u feed the fries???

[Carol_Roberts]

I usually start bbs at 7 days. By 21 days the fry are eating small bits of adult food and california blackworms

[hanleong]

hmm... another 2 days passed.. what I did (out of desperation) was to shine a torchlight (with a pc of white paper in front to cut down the glare) at the corner where the fries are crowding..

and it did help a little.. about 1/2 of the fries now swim away from that corner and attaches themselves to the parents! the other half.. gone

but now I have got about 80-90 pcs of the fries attaching themselves to the adult.. but they do look slightly smaller than they should be

I will try to post pictures soon!

[jason87]

glad to hear that. waiting for pics :D

[hanleong]

They are unique because they have start to spawn when they are only 3.5" (excluding tail). I have thought that they may be too young to handle the parenting but they proved me wrong... they are infact doing a great job now.

The fries are ok now, but the picture below shows exactly what happened when they (at times) just refused to attach themselves on the parents.. and are just crowding at a corner...

[hanleong]

picture showing fries on parents body

[hanleong]

another picture

[hanleong]

last picture

[Carol_Roberts]

I'm glad it all worked out for you. Good luck with your babies.

[ping]

Nice pair :) Good luck

Regards,
Ronny

[GulfCoastDiscus]

Nice spots. I hope they do well. Give us an undate when you can.

Dan

[Rob]

Nice looking fish.

Good Luck! ;D

[dannop]

Great looking pair! Let me know if you would be interested in selling some of the young!

[jason87]

wow. the parents' size are only mid-adults size. and yet they can successfully produce fries. are they stunted or young?

[piero]

One of my pairs measure around 3.5 inches or so too. Produced 100 fries in the last spawn and much more productive than abother pair which is bigger in size. Sometimes feeding them too much, make them lazy which may lead to low fertility and low hatch rate.

Seems like a lot of people in the states like our hatchlings but we are not too sure how we can actually ship it to the states. Does Fedex have this type of services?

[dannop]

Fedex sure does! Where would you ship from???

:D

[crazy4discus]

hey great looking pair!!