Green Mandarin (Synchiropus splendidus) Breeding Log!

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LOL Larry, I definitely KNEW what you were talking about the moment I read it ;)

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OK, so tonight's spawn..I did a lot. First, 4 QUICKTIME vids, all for Luis and whomever else wants to learn how I hand-collect floating pelagic eggs of mandarins (it'd probably work any other floating egg as well)

The first two show the pipette method up close:

http://www.cichlidrecipe.com/nanoreef/DSCN4340.mov - 5 MB
http://www.cichlidrecipe.com/nanoreef/DSCN4343.mov - 7.5 MB

This next one shows me towards the end of egg collection, going through the tank with my "spice jar" ($1 at BB&B) - notice how much more water I collect for roughly the same amount of eggs. I also collect a ton of other "junk"...algae, rotifers, whatever else happens to be at the surface.

http://www.cichlidrecipe.com/nanoreef/DSCN4348.mov - 16.5 MB

The last video, I'm pretty much at the end of collecting, only going for small clumps of eggs (4-5) and single eggs. Note how much less water I collect.

http://www.cichlidrecipe.com/nanoreef/DSCN4349.mov - 16.5 MB


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Most of the eggs are underneath the microscope (QX5) at 10X shooing time lapse video...maybe I'll get lucky and get another good hatch. However, I DID SPILL almost half of the eggs and recollected probably 75% of what I spilled, more or less these went through far more abuse than normal. The few eggs I couldn't get into the container were just placed into the larval tank to fend for themselves. Tomorrow will tell how things end up turning out, but in the end, even if there's no hatch perhaps we'll still learn something.

Matt
 
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One more interesting/unusual observation for the evening - in the cardinalfish tank, our #2 female mandarin was all up and about, swimming in the open water column. Either she's starting to be ready to mate (and was looking for one) OR someone spooked her. She's definitely healthy at this point, and I'm contemplating adding a #2 male in with her, but also wondering if this will cause problems with the male Red Scooter Blenny. Definitely unsure, as I thought the male RSB might behave aggressively towards the female mandarin but he could care less...

Matt
 
Hi mwp
Could I please ask you a quick question? Oops, guess I just did :0
I'm trying to get rotifers and greenwater going, but things are not going as well as I'd hoped. When you add your culture medium to the greenwater, do you get it the same temperature and just add it, or do you drip it in slowly? Same question for adding greenwater to the rotifer culture? The thing is, my greenwater is not flourishing, and 3 of the 4 times it just turns white after a few days. Also, after diluting my rotifer culture, they seem to be, well, all dead - no movement.
Sorry it's a bit out of place, but I'm really desperate ...
 
Matt was up late, so I'll take a stab at this.
Pour the culture medium at any speed you want, whether it is adding medium to greenwater, or greenwater to rotifers. They are not that delicate.

Love your signature line.

I have a thread where I describe my greenwater and rotifer process. I'll try to post it. Meanwhile, have a look at the sticky at the top of the Fish Breeding Forum list. There is a nice article on microfood culture there.
 
Thanks Kathy for droppin' in to answer that one! In my experience rotifers are pretty rock-solid creatures...you really have to abuse them to kill them! Phytoplankton cultures are a bit more touchy. I always NUKE my new culture water to sterilize it, then let it cool, still sealed, to room temperature. The next day I can start harvesting phytoplankton, removing 50-80% of a culture and then filling back up with the sterilized water&F2 media. Once in a while I have a culture that seems to fail...that's harvested 100%, the container disposed of, and the culture restarted in a new vessel with a portion of a healthy culture (I have 3 cultures for each species going, it gives me a bit of backup). Only once did it appear that all 3 cultures were failing...I harvested 90% of all 3 and added the sterilized media, and that brought one back up, which I then used to reseed the other 2 (again, in new containers).

The main thing that I do that breaks with convention is that I use water mixed up to tank-strength salinity (i.e. as high as 1.025). That has removed salinity shock, not that it was an issue to begin with. The other thing I do is I DON'T try to culture my rotifers to huge densities...I only feed 3-6 fluid oz of harvested phytoplankton per day to the 1 gallon rotifer cultures. IF I need to ramp up rotifer production, I feed more and start harvesting, but normally I only harvest when a culture vessel is filled to the brim, at which point usually 50% is removed.

The "plankton culture manual" is definitely worth the investment, that's just my $0.02. Microscopes are also useful...the QX5 doesn't cut it on phytoplankton, but for zooplankton it'll do the job.

Most of those links posted (i.e. the microfoods sticky post that Kathy pointed you two) are very helpful at a hobbyist level.
 
Well, the microscope software CRASHED at about 12 hours of timelapse and I LOST that vid (I think) - I've set it back up shooting time lapse of a couple of eggs at 60X that look like they're going to hatch.

Matt
 
NO babies left from our earlier spawn, at least none that I can find, and last night's spawn didn't hatch at all under the microscope. GRRRRR!

Matt
 
Thanks to both of you. The thing is: I have read those, and many other, threads and articles (I also have Joyce Wilkersons's book "Clownfishes"), and as far as I can tell, I'm doing it as prescribed. However, things are not working out well.
One bottle with rotifers were filled up after harvesting and that bottle actually gave me my greenest greenwater to date after 2 days, with no rotifers seen moving around. Then I added some more culture medium, and this morning it's a bottle with green chunks lying at the bottom - still no sign of rotifers. And the other greenwater bottle is still only slightly-green after a week, also with chunks at the bottom. As far as I can tell there must be something wrong with my culture medium - I'll try making up a new batch precisely according to recipe and try again. Hopefully the greenwater will still "catch on" and a few rotifer cysts are anxious to live ...
 
Lots of calanoids swimming around the tank after an hour of darkness but no mandarin spawn this evening! Well, not feeding for a few days last week definitely seems to have impacted the mandarins...it's been 7 days since a spawn?

Luis got some GREAT pictures of Mandarin Eggs and hopefully he'll be adding in in the weeks and months to come. So this is definitely another thread to subscribe to - http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=8001390

Matt
 
So I actually can't believe I'm saying this, but I have a big trip coming up and will be away from the larvae for 4-5 days, the larval tank is midway through getting bleached, and I have to be up darn early to go to the office (which is unusual for a Thursday). PLUS, 2 of the tanks have Nitrates that have blown off the scale since I started feeding more PREPARED foods that are in desperate need of 50% water changes twice over...(wierd, but it's the ONLY thing I've changed in the last month).

I'm turning the pumps back on and letting this one just flow down the overflow...it's a smaller spawn and I'm simply unprepared and won't be around to observe them during the hatching time. Even if I got lucky and got a bunch of hatchlings I'm not going to be able to give them the care they'll need at this time...and seeing as how it's a new moon, there should be another spawn in a couple days.

Most definitely NOT giving up, but something had to give :)

Matt
 
I have to start by saying that after about page 14, I stop reading so I may have missed something.

I have breed a lot of freshwater fish and successfully raised 30 clowns fish from eggs several years ago. (7th attempt)

I found that reducing the salinity gradually helped increase viable embryo's. This required many water changes so it is hard to say if it was the former or the latter that made the success rate go up.
Hyposalinity does reduce stress on all vertabrate fish and would be something worth a try. No lower than 1.002 at 78F over a three day period.

I also used what I called the toilet bowl design. I used a small goldfish bowl and glued airline tubing to the upper rim and to the bottom. Both lines had holes in them. The top line kept water flowing down the sides and the bottom airline flowed water across the bottom. The outlet for the water went through a small medicine botttle with fine mesh screen that was mounted in the center of the bowl via eggcrate. This contraption was placed inside the parent tank to maintain proper water temp. A tee fitting and a t valve regulated the flow from a small ehiem. I had great success with this design and it was easy to make.

I also had great success with dragonets over the last 30 years. I do not feed them (except for the occasional brine shrimp treat). They feed exclusively on copepods that are readily availabe in the display tank. I would suggest culturing them and screening them for size and use them for food should you get a spawn with numbers you are happy with and live to the 2nd or 3rd day.

Just my two cents and I commend you for your unwaivering efforts and willingness to share your successes and failures.

Good Luck!
 
Mimic Tang, I've had fry live as long as 10 or 14 days (there was a mixed batch going, so we can't be certain if it was older or younger).

Westcott, I may try hyposalinity down the line, but what interests me even more is your toilet bowl design. FWIW I finally procured some fine screening to work with as a material for larval collectors, outflow screening etc, so this is going to open up some new avenues for hatching/rearing systems housed IN the parental tank.

I'm working on culturing a calanoid copepod I've isolated from the parental tank; the issue with the copepods that the parents feed on is that they're benthic in juvenile and adult forms...baby mandarins are pelagic and require a foodsource in the water column. My hope is that between enriched SS-Strain rotifers AND a supplementation of a calanoid naulpiii that maybe I can kick-start them far enough along to start taking L-Strain Rots, larger copepods etc, then enriched brine nauplii and so forth.

I know this thread is a rambling book at this point, but if you only read half, you missed A LOT of info!

The #1 problem is still HATCH RATES! Raising 30 clowns probably isn't that difficult if you start out with 700 larvae. Raising even 1 mandarin when you only start out with 10-20 larvae really stacks the odds against you.

Matt
 
One other thing I wanted to mention. Using a larger breeding container can slow the rate of contamination of the breeding tank.

I used a 10 gallon sump to the side with divertered water from a sump pump.

I will try to read the rest of the thread over the weekend. Good Luck!
 
Hi Matt,
i was just moving around some forums and found a thread on raising larval shrimps... Ok, so what ? Two interesting ideas on the container to do this that can be used for some other species, including fishes, an upwelling system (first page) and a kind of a flat kriesel (page 3).
Even if we find out it´s not good for mandarins, it´s very worth a look !

http://www.sgreefclub.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=37318&st=0

Anderson.
 
Anderson, I'll check that out!

So...WE'VE had ANOTHER SPAWN! - it occured sometime between 11:30 pm 8-26-06 and 1:42 AM 8-27-06; basically I came home, shut out the lights late, and went to watch "The Life Aquatic", stopped midway through just to "see" if there was a spawn..thought there might be.

Anyway, it wasn't a HUGE spawn, maybe 400 eggs, but with the newly hatched GBG's getting the red carpet treatment the mandarin eggs are going to have to fend for themselves (which to be fair is most likely certain doom in the parental reef tank). Still taking a breather on the Mandarins to focus on getting some more rearing experience and success with an "easier" species.

MP
 
Hi Matt
great thread,
mandarins are one of my favorites, my mandarins were dedicated hunters of the pods in their tank, but I dont think I had a pair, and my attention was elsewhere,

ref an egg hatcher, are you familiar with the jars used for hatching trout and other salmonid eggs ?

basically they have air released at the bottom to keep the eggs in suspension and a small water flow at the bottom and up and overflowing for water change, now, could you duplicate this in a mesh or net cone in the parents tank ? An airline and stone is simple, then possibly place a small powerhead near the bottom of the cone angled upward ?

I had thought of something similar for other pelagic larvae.
 
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