Hi everyone,
I'm a French frogfish enthusiast and I had my first spawning last week.
So, I breed frogfishes for some months and I have a trio of supposed A. nummifer.
Some days ago, one of them was enormous and refused to eat anything for last two weeks.
The egg raft is huge compared to the size of the female. It's really impressive!
I hope that pictures, despite their poor quality, will allow you to appreciate the volume and consider the number of eggs contained.
Sadly eggs seems to be unfertilized.
The egg mass was yesterday adorned with a white veil and begins to lose its spherical shape.
Visible eggs the first few days are no longer visible at all. It seems they have not been fertilized despite the presence of a male.
Two assumptions:
- The male is not yet an adult and could not fertilize the egg mass
- The male and female are misidentified and are not from the same species .
Besides, is it possible that different frogfishes species hybridized?
It is not at all my personal approach, but I'm asking the question.
Anyway, I began to doubt of the right identification of my specimens.
This could explain the total lack of the third frogfish for the female.
My specimens are far from 4" that can be found in the literature in reference to A. nummifer .
They measures a little less than 2" and don't seem to grow since their arrival unlike specimens of A. pictus on which I observed a rather rapid growth with the diet I provide.
I will classify the female easier as A. dorehensis according to its size , the shape of its lure , size and shape of the second doral spine.
For two others, I have to make new pictures to be able to compare more easily. In any case, the male you can see near the female resembles very exactly on the specimen visible frogfish.ch : http://www.frogfish.ch/image/frogfi...mmifer/guest/Juergen-Antennarius-nummifer.jpg identified as nummifer.
I'm a French frogfish enthusiast and I had my first spawning last week.
So, I breed frogfishes for some months and I have a trio of supposed A. nummifer.
Some days ago, one of them was enormous and refused to eat anything for last two weeks.
The egg raft is huge compared to the size of the female. It's really impressive!
I hope that pictures, despite their poor quality, will allow you to appreciate the volume and consider the number of eggs contained.
Sadly eggs seems to be unfertilized.
The egg mass was yesterday adorned with a white veil and begins to lose its spherical shape.
Visible eggs the first few days are no longer visible at all. It seems they have not been fertilized despite the presence of a male.
Two assumptions:
- The male is not yet an adult and could not fertilize the egg mass
- The male and female are misidentified and are not from the same species .
Besides, is it possible that different frogfishes species hybridized?
It is not at all my personal approach, but I'm asking the question.
Anyway, I began to doubt of the right identification of my specimens.
This could explain the total lack of the third frogfish for the female.
My specimens are far from 4" that can be found in the literature in reference to A. nummifer .
They measures a little less than 2" and don't seem to grow since their arrival unlike specimens of A. pictus on which I observed a rather rapid growth with the diet I provide.
I will classify the female easier as A. dorehensis according to its size , the shape of its lure , size and shape of the second doral spine.
For two others, I have to make new pictures to be able to compare more easily. In any case, the male you can see near the female resembles very exactly on the specimen visible frogfish.ch : http://www.frogfish.ch/image/frogfi...mmifer/guest/Juergen-Antennarius-nummifer.jpg identified as nummifer.
