Tobrienne's Trial Run Spawn for Hobbyist Challenge

[Tobrienne]

Hey Guys,

I decided to enter my fry into the hobbyist challenge. This will be a little bit off the cuff since I will be raising these fry "artificially"

Lets start with the story behind it.

My breeding pair was in a beautiful show tank (I didn't want to go BB, I figured I could do it with stuff in the tank. Lesson learned!)

At the beginning of July I had a good spawn that went free swimming and then were eaten. Ever since I had 2 batches of eggs that didn't last 24 hours.

On July 29th morning I was greeted with a healthy clutch of eggs from my pair. I didn't have any reason to believe it would last. But it did.

I copied my timeline from another post I did in the breeding section:
July 31: Wigglers - attached to driftwood
Aug 1: Wigglers - moved to the dial of the heater.. thrived well here were very visable

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Aug 2: Wigglers - moved back to the driftwood.. some escaped and were floating around the top of the tank but all appear to be back with mom and dad now

August 3rd it seemed that they were all gone. I was a little upset by this. I saw one or two in the tank, scooped them out into a shallow dish and decided to raise them myself. As I was doing a WC on the 40g tank mom was attacking me like crazy. I was swishing around the gravel... lets just say doing a REALLY thorough cleaning. After the water settled and before I removed any water for the WC I noticed another.. and another.. free swimmer! In total I had 6 now.

After much deliberation I decided to take everything out of the tank and go BB. I decided that the fry were getting lost in the gravel. I had no idea they needed everything nice and bright for attachment. Everything in my tank was dark! So while I was taking everything out I found 2 more fry. I had a grand total of 8.

2 died.

Then I had 6. Everything was out of the tank, I taped white paper to the bottom and sides and kept the light on to help the fry attach to the parents. I also lowered the water considerably.

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This picture was before I took out the gravel but it is an idea of how low the water was.

Then this afternoon 3 were dead, likely from starvation and so I decided to pull the remaining 3.

The remaining fry are in a new setup, mom and dad in their new setup. Pictures of those will follow this post as well as a short video. :)

[DiscusDrew]

If you want to enter fry in the competition (and I really really hope you can/do) you will need 20-30 fish to start with and of those 8 will be picked to track throughout the year of the competition. You just may want to check with Al my friend thats all im saying. They did extend the deadline though.... which means if I were in your shoes, I would try to get them to have a larger more successful spawn since you still have a month to enter them! Just a thought, might try to give them the space away from the fry, which it sounds like you pulled them already anyway, so that they can get back on schedule and spawn again. Now at least they are in a good tank for it so that is great, just get in the habit (given their history) of caging the eggs about 2 hours or so after they lay, that way none get eaten and you maximize the hatch rate. Even good parents that know what the hell they are doing can do more harm than good as they take care of their eggs. When they go free swimming they will go through the netting and then the parents hopefully will take it well from there. Good luck my friend!