Update: 12/29/2006
Update: 12/29/2006
Nothing overly spectacular has occured in the last few weeks but thought I'd update anyways.
All the babies I have remaining (6 now) are doing okay and eating cyclopeeze like fishy crack. Occasionally supplemented with newly hatched BBS. Still rockin' on, and getting bigger too. Although you probably couldn't tell, they're still tiny little guys.
I did have a baby suffer from "sudden fright syndrome" the other day. Luckily I had just read a post at Reef.Org about this very thing and it helped save the life of one of my babies.
Apparently infant and juvi bangaii's are very succeptible to this condition. Sudden Fright Syndrome is where for some reason the fish is spooked, lights coming on, a door slaming shut, something like that. When their spooked this badly, they stop moving, and float to the bottom where they lay, looking dead as a doornail. I took the advice of a guy from the other post, who used a spoon to gently keep water moving over there gills. I didn't want to use a kitchen spoon so i grabbed a Pipette I have and sat for almost an hour in front of this little tank keeping a current on his face. With each squirt of water he would perk up a bit and try to move his fins but kept sinking to the bottom. I had given up hope of him making it through and set the pipette down to go grab a net and help euthanize the poor suffering baby. I hate seeing fish die slowly like that. But by the time i got back with the net, he was up at the surface with all his siblings, eating on some lunch. I can't tell you how releaved I was that this actually worked. It's quite possible that several of my losses were do to this particular condition but I'd never seen it happen, I actually got to watch this guy freak out and stop moving so i was sure what the problem was, something scared him...and in all likely hood it was the dog running by the tank, he's clumsy and bumps it a bit. And allthough i cannot be 100% certain of this quite yet, I do have what appears to be either a 'pair' forming or a really friendly couple of babies. Two in particular, happens to be the two largest babies, tend to hang out together apart from the rest of the crowd. I have heard of Bangaii's pairing up as early as 4 -5 months old, but these are only 3 months old now. We'll see how they progress in the next couple months to come.
As for "mommy and daddy", they have yet to spawn again since the last batch was aborted. I've changed up my feeding a bit to include more frozen cubes (mysis, krill, reef plankton) and am going to try and get another spawn soon. I've also been sticking the larger adult brine shrimp from my culture in the display tank and it's always the Bangaii's who find em first and utterly destroy them! They sure do like the food that wiggles at em. I'm very careful now not to shake my fingers too much while holding a frozen cube in front of my maxijet. The female got a little close one day and nipped the finger tip, but I must not have tasted good cause she ran away, lol.
That's it for now, stay tuned for more exciting news to come!
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