Anemone Dominated Breeding Grounds.... The Journey Has Begun

dc said:
Cool, after a few batches you can tell when they're going to hatch. I never kept track of dates as I had no interest in raising them, but after awhile I was never wrong about the night they'd hatch.
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Hopefully :)

I can definately tell that the temp increase and food change has made some difference, this clutch was much larger, and the egg development has been far more consistant. Last clutch the fry's eyes in the eggs were light silver for 2 days then one day of a silver/copper color, then hatched the next day during the day (From what I was told, hard eggs come from to much shrimp and make it hard for fry to hatch)

With this batch, eggs barely got silver eyes yesterday, and today had a nice copper/silver tint to the eyes, I am mostly certain tonight will be hatch tonight (at least a partial of nothing else)
 
Update:

Ok after talking to Pickle, lets call this 7 DPS, the day the layed counted

After looking at the eggs tonight it looks as though they should for sure hatch out tonight. They are almost all still there, the male did an excellent job of cleaning without eating them all.

I will be setting up the fry tank tonight when I get home from work and the lights in the tank go off at approx. 12pm. Hopefully tommorow I will have some new fry swimming around in the fry tank, I am excited to finally get off and running with this and hope my first hatch goes successful (not counting the last spawn that day hatched).

With more consistant feeding and a higher temp of 82 it looks like the clown eggs are on the proper 7 day cycle I wanted to see.

I have seen quite a few split hatches, if that ends up being the case I may let the second half go as I am not sure I want to put them in with the older fry. While I know you can do that I do not want to risk fouling the water in a small tank. I am limiting the fry to approx. 150 or less in the 5g tank, I feel any more than that will raise the ammonia levels to quickly and may cause me to lose all of the fry.

Here is to hopping all the reading I have done and talking to excellent breeders like Mike has helped me to avoid some of the common pitfalls.
 
LittleBee said:
Woo let's see some babies! :D
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Update:

Apparently my clowns like to play tricks on me, I got no hatch out last night. Waited until 2AM and still had no hatch.

I guess tonights got to be the night, I can actually see some of the babies yolk sacks inside the eggs so it drives me nuts to not have babies yet.

Here is hopping for tonight. Either way I got the fry tank all setup and ready, so transfer should be easy enough once I get the babies to hatch. At least the male has not picked eggs off much at all, they are almost all still there.

My female is already looking swollen again and should lay in a few days, hopefully soon after these ones hatch incase I need another try. I will post picture of the babies as soon as I get them, hopefully :)
 
Good Luck!

Good Luck!

Would like to hear details on how you go about catching and moving the fry...if all goes well, please include some of those details and pics if possible. Best of luck to you!
 
Tmoriarty said:
Update:

Apparently my clowns like to play tricks on me, I got no hatch out last night. Waited until 2AM and still had no hatch.

I guess tonights got to be the night, I can actually see some of the babies yolk sacks inside the eggs so it drives me nuts to not have babies yet.

Here is hopping for tonight. Either way I got the fry tank all setup and ready, so transfer should be easy enough once I get the babies to hatch. At least the male has not picked eggs off much at all, they are almost all still there.

My female is already looking swollen again and should lay in a few days, hopefully soon after these ones hatch incase I need another try. I will post picture of the babies as soon as I get them, hopefully :)
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IME, if I can still yolk sac then the babies aren't ready to hatch yet. By the time they hatch there is almost no yolk whatsoever. That's why clown babies can only last about 3 days after hatching without food.

FWIW: My percs take about 10-12 days to hatch depending on the temp. So if you posted the egg pics on the day you took them, you may have to wait a couple more days before they hatch.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the tip Phil, Perhaps the female being a True perc has slown the cycle down a little.

Update:

I swear these fish are having me pulling my hair out. Everything set up, pumps off, wait for almost two hours... no hatch, what gives?

Guess tonight I try one more night with this batch for the hatch out, I don't know why it is taking so long for the hatch, tonight is

9 DPS
 
Riffraffreef said:
Would like to hear details on how you go about catching and moving the fry...if all goes well, please include some of those details and pics if possible. Best of luck to you!
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Once they hatch out I will be transferring them to a 5.5g tank I have setup for the fry. I will probably take a couple pictures of them when I am catching them and once transferred. I will document success or failure, I know that instant success with raising the fry isn't a given so I will attempt to document this as best I can for others to avoid pitfalls I may run into.

Lucky for me I am hopping to have those minimized by the many good tips I have read on reefcentral and tips I have been given from other experienced breeders.

As for catrching them. Wait 30 minutes to an hour after lights out, use a small pen light or other flashlight device and shine it into the tank in the corner. The fry will be attracted to the light and you should be able to scoop them up with a small container.

The better alternative is getting them to spawn on a removable rock or peice of tile, and even better is having them in their own broodstock tank.

At least that is how it is suppose to work out, guess I will know as soon as i get to mess around with it a bit, hopefully tonight.
 
Update:

So good news and bad news, I guess it works that way in this hobby. So technically I did get a hatch last night..... but only one egg hatched lol. I waited two hours and by the end had one lonely fry swimming up by the flashlight.

So I expect a full hatchout tonight (hopefully, I mean I have been saying that for days). The only thing I can think of that may be possible is the female still has a lot of the shrimp in her system from before I stopped feeding as much, and as such the eggs are harder and are taking longer to thin out and hatch.

I did take a picture of the lonely fry in the tank, and to top it off, I figured why not toss him in the fry tank, its running anyways. I will try to get those posted tommorow morning.

So I did this very non-technical as it was only one fry. He was sucked out with a turkey baster and transferred directly to the fry tank. Suprisingly he did not seem to suffer any SFS (sudden fright syndrome) but after about an hour in the tank he was swimming at the bottom.

I knew from information I have gathered that it meant one of two things, either he was dying, or he was running away from to much light. So I took the light off the 5g and taped over half the shield for the bulb, this gave the tank a dark half and a light half.

I also added some rotifers (concentration approximately 30 Per ML) and tinted the water a bit.

The lone ranger has been going to town on the rotifers and has full range of that 5g, at least until his brothers join him hopefully tonight.

For now he is named Eins (one in german) since he was the only one to hatch out. I am sure he will get lost in the group, or maybe if I never get a night hatch this go around I get a chance to raise a single fry all the way through meta. I guess that makes water quality easier to handle :/
 
Lol, well I figured I could see if the light was to bright and if he was eating, and if the water quality was ok.

I know a lot of deaths happen in the first night, and I figured If he died I could remedy the issues before the hatch that will hopefully (seroiusly hopefully) happen tonight.

He is pretty cool for sure, I probably spent well over an hour or two just starring at him in amazement.
 
So mama clown is a true perc and daddy clown is a false perc (ocellaris) right? I didn't know that worked. Sorry for my ignorance. Great thread, very inspiring!
 
batchelor2169 said:
So mama clown is a true perc and daddy clown is a false perc (ocellaris) right? I didn't know that worked. Sorry for my ignorance. Great thread, very inspiring!
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Yes indeed, you can combine a few different clowns with varrying levels of success. True/False percs are very similar and are not hard to mate up.
 
Update:

1 DPH (finally)

So I get to do an update with a hatch finally. After around an hour of the lights out I checked the tank and all the eggs were gone, but I could see no babies in the tank. I was pretty sure the male had eaten the clutch to prepare for the next spawn. I figured I would leave the flashlight there for a while though and see if I could get a lone survivor to join Eins in the fry tank.

To my suprise after about 20 minutes I had a small swarm of fry at the top eating pods in the beam of light. Not a ton but around 25 or so fry. I was going to try to scoop them out but with my tank being as large as it is that was just not an option (they were up to 30" deep in the tank) Instead I used an airline tube to start a siphon and give them a little ride down the slide to the small bucket I had prepared.

It was fairly quick althought I did have to recheck the light beam every 15 or so minutes to pick up any stragglers.

It was obvious pretty quick that out of the 50 I removed from the tank only a handful were going to be strong enough to make the transfer. The strong ones were in the top of the light beam eating pods right of the surface, very active. The others were further down, some on the sand not moving much.

I removed them all regardless just in case there was a chance they were going to be alright. My procedures were very non technical. I performed a quick transfer to the bucket with a siphon line and then placed the bucket in the fry tank and slowly released them into the tank. PH levels were the same as well as temp, there was a bit of a salinity difference (0.003) but I did not feel that would be to much of an issue.

Most of the fry made the transfer just fine, aside from the weak swimmers that were pulled from the tank. I gave them through the night to pull through and removed a good portion of them this morning.

Out of the 50 or so fry I transferred to the fry tank I removed around 20 this morning. I only see about 10 actively searching the column for food, about 10-15 on the sides of the tank (but with full bellies) and another 5 still fighting but swimming weak on the bottom.

I am not sure how much success I will have with this batch but I am hopping to get a few fry through meta just to see what things I need to change in my process. I did figure a few things out that I will try to post up on my next update. And of course...... a picture :)

IMG_3267.jpg
 
Awesome stuff! Every time you get a little further in the process. Soon, it'll be a piece of cake! Nice work, and good luck!
 
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