Green Mandarin (Synchiropus splendidus) Breeding Log!

[snorvich]

Well the spawning seems related to their biological clock which seems to be regulated by the timer for my lights. Lights go out at 9 but there is always some residual light in the room from other rooms with lights still on. All normally go out by ten. Which is when they do their thing. Their thing is very close to the surface, perhaps two inches. But I don't know that they do it every night because I don't always catch them. The prespawning thing always seems to be the same though. They dance then rise together as in the photo and then zap go apart and there for a brief moment are, I assume, fertilized eggs. Pretty neat. But for me, that is probably as far as it is going to go as that tank is devoted to fairy wrasses. And it is a large tank with kludgey access besides. In the kitchen tank, I have a psychedelic male mandarin but no female. That tank would be easy access but I don't have a pair. I assume that this type of mandarin spawns the same way but I am unsure.

 

[snorvich]

And in any case, I have no chance in hell of getting another tank. My nanocube quarantine tank caused enough of a problem.

 

[geckotail]

amazing pictures . thanks for sharing.

 

[mwp]

Alrighty, it's 6-17 and the tanks lights were turned off at 10:15 PM central. The ambient room lights got turned off around 10:40 PM after I did my nightly rotifer/copepod feeding routine. A quick peak into the tank just now let me know that they are courting...let's see if tonight is the night! I'm still not entirely convinced that I didn't somehow MISS the spawning 2 nights ago.

FWIW,

Matt

 

[mwp]

6-18-06, 12:28 AM - They FINALLY spawned!

collecting eggs...more later.

MP

 

[BrianPlankis]

Matt,

Very cool. Kinda funny, now that I stay up later I end up looking for updates to your thread just before I go to bed. Good luck with this spawn! We are all pulling for you to have a good hatch.

Brian

 

[mwp]

So here's a recap of what went down. I scooped out the vast majority of eggs into one of my "collection" tubs, about a 1/2 gallon gladware.

From there, I then used a plastic 3 ML pipette (with the fine tip cut off) to suck out the individual eggs. I then had these all collected in a spice jar...relatively next to nothing remained as far as parental water.

Meanwhile I left the pumps in the tank off and collected another 30-40 eggs from the tank with the pipette, again placing them into the spice jar.

From there, the contents of the spice jar were poured into the larval tank with the flow-through kriesel being powered by the minijet pump at the 2nd to lowest setting. The two air bubblers are running at about 1 bubble per second..not doing much other than providing a touch of positive pressure.

I sacrificed a small clump of eggs to the makeshift "microscope"...here's what I can tell you about the eggs from observation under 10X. First off, there are some tiny brown things that MOVE...basically from what I can figure out this brown stuff in the water is part of the "brown slime" in the tank that I'm currently having to battle. Don't know where it came from and can't figure out what's causing it...don't know if brown cyanobacteria move or not, but this stuff is strange slime...it grows in almost a "mucus" that suspends these little brown animals inside it.

Anyways, not sure what, if any, this stuff will have on the eggs, but a lot of them got caught up in the slime with the pumps being off for 2 hours (by that time the water surface was a slick of organic debris...).

The eggs themselves were all basically clear, but under 10X you could see some sort of "texture" to them, not sure what it is, but it could be early cell division...10X just isn't enough. But basically they were not "crystal" clear, there was some lumpy clear tapioca-looking substance inside the eggs. One of the following pictures kinda shows it a little.

Anyways, here are closeups as close as I could get - the eggs are roughly 30 minutes old at the time of these photographs.

Well guys, tell me, from these pics, does it look like the eggs have been fertilized?

MP

 

[mwp]

OK, big change of plans...I hope I didn't already kill off this batch!

In a nutshell, I didn't notice this before but a ton of gunk had built up on the bridal veil netting in the last 24 hours. Things were flowing fine, but the bridal veil was making a GREAT mechanical filter to the point of raising the water level in the kriesel by almost an inch beyond the tank's surface level.

I watched the water...NO eggs in the kriesel?! I watched a small bubble as it slowly moved from the far side of the bowl, making circular trips up and down in the water current. It slowly moved closer and closer to the hole in the side; as it got really close it moved towards the center and ultimately moved straight HORIZONTALLY to the bridal veil screening.

I turned off the pump and "poof"... a bunch of mandarin eggs came off the bridal veil and started making their round the world trips! OK, so this setup for a flow through with this much current just isn't going to work...I flushed the contents of the bridal veil back into the kriesel and then poured the whole kriesel out into the 10 gallon tank (which has about 6 gallons of water in it). So we're going to go the "researcher route", just let them float in an aquarium that has one air feed going (I know, they used AIR STONES etc...this should be OK for now).

If this spawn fails I'm willing to chalk it up to a flow through kriesel mishap. Otherwise, it looks like centripital force was working beautifully on the eggs. In the future, if a flow through kriesel again merits investigation, I'm going to change where the drains are and where the water comes in...in other words, kriesel #4?!

Doesn't look like the eggs got smashed, but they did get a bit of pressure on them trying to go through the net.

We'll see....

MP

 

[aomont]

It would be kind selfish to ask you taking pictures every hour to wach egg development....... but after 8 hours of good sleep, pictures would be SO good !
Anyway, following it through your project is our addiction.

Hope the "open" aquarium technique works better !
Anderson.

 

[mwp]

Well Anderson, I was in bed but just couldn't sleep - saw your post so figured "what the heck".

I sampled 9 eggs...may have killed these off because I knocked the slide off the flashlight after checking them, but out of those 9 eggs at this point all 9 looked fertilized. You'll see in the pictures below that it appears that there's a ball of cells forming within the eggs.

Eggs, shot with the macro, at 135-136 minutes (aka. 2 hours, 15 minutes) of age (since being spawned).

I'm not 100% on this - would love the opinions of more experienced eyes, but I THINK we're getting VERY GOOD fertilization rates. I'll have to check on future spawns too...we could be looking at a fluke occurance due to the postponement of the prior night's spawning activity!

If we can rule out INFERTILITY we'll really narrow things down. Egg Quality could be an issue still, as could various infections of the eggs, and we could still be on the hunt for an ideal incubation solution.

To me, the strangest part is that the eggs sink around hatching time. A kriesel type device could really help keep the eggs up in the water column. It makes some sense that the eggs would SINK at hatching time, thereby placing the larvae at least a few feet down in the water vs. remaining RIGHT ON THE SURFACE...their short time to settlement may have something to do with the eggs sinking before a hatch..or vice versa...who knows?!

So, what do you guys think - a 2nd random sampling and at least 8 or maybe even all 9 eggs in the sample look to be developing (aka. "fertile").

MP

 

[mwp]

(MP really wants to do some time lapse photography through a microscope...how cool would that be?!)

I have to check my camera - IF it shoots timelapse, I'm sure I could set up my camera to take pictures periodically of a few eggs on the microscope slide with the LED flashlight (that thing will burn for hours and I don't *think* it gets too hot).

Always scheming and plotting! Gonna try to sleep again

MP

 

[mwp]

Ok, seriously, I'm off to bed, but LOOK at that series of photos around 135-136 minutes....notice how the eggs all started out kinda spread out and over the course of a minute or two they were all drawn back into clusters? HMMMMMMMM...not sure what that all means, but it sure is interesting!

MP

 

[aomont]

Yeah Matt ! They look quite different to me at 136 and, in this case, different = GOOD !
Again no self experience but, comparing to what I´ve been reading (although not enough, it´s been quite a lot as I´m doing now), they seem to be doing fine. Let´s follow the pics and see when anything goes wrong or watch another unknow success hopefully.

Thanks for keeping the addiction !

Anderson.

 

[DColeman]

Excellent work Matt! I hope you can get some good survival rates after a bit of trial and error. The more fish bred in captivity the better!

Maybe one day when ive finished my degree i will give them a shot!

Daniel

 

[mako56]

Very cool Matt, I have noticed that my female gets very fat every once in a while. I have never noticed them doing any kind of mating dance and I have been checking but they always both seem to be sleeping on the bottom at night guess I will have to watch closer next time when I see her looking like a little balloon. I got so much going on with the learning process of my baby yellow striped maroon clowns but It would be so cool to watch baby mandarins grow. Do you know when they start to color up? I think someday I will try to raise some and it will be because of you working so hard on this. Thanks

 

[mwp]

First, Mike, I want to say that Mai's article with S. picturatus has them developing a more adult coloration scheme around 10 weeks. Sadovy's research basically sums it up, "flexion" occuring at 12-14 days (basically what sounds like actual "settlement" / metamorphisis into a juvenile). By 30 days they'll have the early makings of the adult pattern, and by 1 CM in length (10 mm) they'll be in adult coloration.

So here's another look at the eggs at 704 minutes (11 hours, 44 minutes). Out of this sampling of 15 eggs, one looks dead, 5 have clearly developed larvae that should hatch in the next few hours, and the remaining 9 still look "fertile" but aren't showing the same progress in growth.

MP

 

[mwp]

HOOO RAY! We got back from running some errands at 5:00 PM (happened to find another FEMALE mandarin so she got snapped up too) but the big news - WE HAVE A HUGE HATCH!. More soon!

 

[wla200]

sweet. keep up the good work.

 

[mwp]

Preliminary headcount - about 20 larvae in the tank water...there could be more - it's hard to find them in the dimly lit 10 gallon tank...that's a LOT of water for them to be spread out in.

The tank water is again a little cloudy - I may do a water change this evening.

MP

 

[mwp]

Hey, I realised I haven't posted any pics of the broodstock!

Our Male:

Our First Female:

The new Female, about 50% the overall mass/size of the first two...she'll have to get onto frozen foods and fatten up - still not sure how TWO females is going to pan out!

FWIW,

Matt