12-12-06, 10:00 PM, we have a HATCH! Batch VI officially begins! Just over 7 days from egg laying to hatch...incubation temps hovered around 82-83F
So the lights in the parental tank go off at 9:30 PM...I immediately turn out all the other lights in the room. By 10:00 or so, larvae had started popping off...by 10:30 it looked like the larval collector had captured all it would get, so I spent the next 35 minutes collecting maybe 15 more by hand...mostly with the specimen cup, but the last few deepwater stranglers via a very gentle turkey baster. The larval tank was drained & seived, returning the rotifers and calanoid copepods to the tank along with 5 gallons of parental water earlier today. So far it looks like everything has gone without a hitch, except for the fact that I collected maybe 100 larvae at best.
So somewhere between this afternoon and now, 350 larvae were lost. Don't know if the tankmates got to 'em as they hatched, or if something else happened. Bottom line though, it simply wasn't large enough of a hatch for what I was looking for. I'm thinking that my next move is to try to replace the parent's current spawning setup with some sort of tile arrangement that can be removed and replaced for hatching.
The other strange thing is that at least to me, the larvae look like the "thin" larvae that Wilkeson describes. So, for at least tonight, I think I'm going to leave the lights on and let them feed....probably adding .5 L Nannochloropsis as well. This gametime decision hasn't officially been made.
Any thoughts or advice are welcomed as always...
Matt