Clownfish fry without Rotifers

[cabrego]

Hi all,

I am going to try to raise my clownfish larvae without using live rotifers. I am only doing this because my rotifer culture crashed and I am going to be snowed in for the next few days so I figure I might as well try to save the larvae as they will surely die if I don't.

The foods I have on hand is-

Cyclop-eeze, NLS .5mm pellets, artic copepods. I grounded a mixture of cyclop-eeze and NLS with a spice grinder (mortor). My plan is to keep them in a gallon size tub so the aeration will keep the foods mostly suspended and daily water changes will hopefully be less of a issue.

can anyone give any other tips?

Thanks!

 

[juniorjose]

wow this is cool..i always hear ppl say its impossible to do, but i have never seen anyone even try it. good luck man.

whats NLS?

 

[msman825]

I never did it without rotys.. only can say good luck

 

[birddog486]

in a pinch, for the first couple days you can feed hardboiled egg yolk. Put it in a blender and let it rip with some water. It helps if you add some weight lifters powder to the mix but it isn't mandatory.

Water quality really suffers so keep that in mind.

 

[cabrego]

I am not expecting great results, but my first round of raising fry wasn't anything spectacular-I did manage to save one true perucla who seems to be doing well so far.

NLS is new life spectrum.

 

[Zooid]

If you try the NLS, you will probably need to grind it up finer. Maybe mix in some garlic with whatever you feed. If they were ocellaris, I'd say you may have a chance but perc larvae in my experience seem to be smaller. I have some perc larvae that are a week older than some of my ocellaris larvae and the ocellaris are bigger.
Good luck and let us know how they fare.

 

[juniorjose]

I think anything is possible...im rooting for u man..:beer: prove to us that it is possible to do this.

 

[cabrego]

zooid, you are right, my first batch of true percs developed very slowly the lone survivor I have was the fastest grower and he didnt go through meta until about 2.5-3 weeks

Thanks for the support and the tips guys. My first batch of food is a combination of cyclopeeze and NLS grounded as fine as I could get it, it is basically a fine powder. I tried to use my rotifer sieve to filter out the fine stuff but it didn't work very well. Nothing really made it through-there was quite a bit of dust captured by the sieve when I dumped out the powder, this dust is what I am going extract with a turkey baster, it is the dust clogging the sieve and hopefully the dust is only slightly larger than 53 microns..

 

[reefstew]

Your on the right track, it's food size & keep it moving in the water column.

 

[ramone58]

Tagging alone, hope its works.

 

[cabrego]

Well, I am not going to be able to try it this time around. I was only able to rescue around 20 larvae on hatch night and none of them survived the night. I am not sure what happened to the rest of them, I must have been a little too late. I checked about 1 hour after lights out and only 20.

I was out of town so I suspect the eggs may have been a bit malnourished since they were only feed dry pellets during my time away. Now that I am back, they are back on a good mixed diet (RODS,enriched Brine, NLS pellets).

 

[juniorjose]

man that sucks. im still rooting for u though. they spawn more since they already started. are u still trying to raise them without rotifers on the next round?

 

[Zylski]

Someone I know has attempted feeding reef chili from Bulk Reef Supply to them. He had success for a week but then something else happened to water quality. I think temp dipped and they died. So im guessing thats possible if you try that.

 

[Masoch]

Reef Chili has a bunch of ingredients, many of which are probably too big for fry. But ... Brine Shrimp Direct has freeze dried rotifers and some other tiny foods that might be appropriate.

 

[FMarini]

raising clownfry w/o live foods has been done a number of times. In joyce wilkersons book - she even describes her attempts at raising clownfry w/o rotifers. (apparently she had a rotifer crash right before her hatch). I'd try it, your food list sounds fine-you dont really have a choice

Anyway expect your survival to be a single digit percent at best.