Help with clown fry

[lwillis22]

My clowns laid eggs and the eggs hatched last night. I have them in a hatch tank by themselves which is about 10 gallons with a small heater, two air stones and have all of the sides covered with black construction paper. I am feeding live rotifers. Can anyone give me some help? I have many questions.

1. How often should I feed the rotifers to the fry?
2. How much do I feed?
3. I am adding rotifer food in with the rotifers to the fry tank, how long do I continue this and how green do I want the water?
4. I have pc light over top of them. Should I leave this on all the time? If so, for how long?
5. How do I do a water change on the fry tank? I'm afraid I will suck up the fry.

I probably have many more questions but this is what I am needing help with now. Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[ernieq]

1. You should have rotifers available to them continously. Rotifers are really tiny and the fry eat a lot in the first few days.
2. Put enough rotifers so that the fry don't have to swim too much to find them. Since they are alive, you cannot really overfeed as long as you tint the water green, the fry will eventually eat them all.
3. I used RG complete and on a 10 gallon nursery with about 4 gallons of water I would put in about 15 to 20 drops once in the morning and once in the evening which is when I also added rotifers.
4. The first day I like to leave the light on for 24 hours, but you should diffuse the light with a a couple sheets of paper in front. Then remove one sheet at about 4 days and the other one after meta. After the first day, I give them a normal day/night cycle.
5. For the first 3 days you don't really do water changes, you manage ammonia with some chloram-x or similar product. You replace evaporated water with ro water at a rate of about 1 drop every 2 seconds.

After that, I would use turkey baster to remove water and dead fry into a bucket to make sure I didn't suck any live ones. Then you drip-in the replacement salt water from the brood tank at rate of about 1 drop per second.

 

[lwillis22]

Thanks so much for the reply. Not real sure how to replace the evaoporated water with so many drops per second as I have no way to do that. The light I am using is just a cf laying on the corner of the tank. I am afraid if I lay paper towel under it that it would catch fire or something, maybe I'm being silly.

 

[_shorty_]

I haven't done this yet myself, but was planning to set up a bucket above the tank and start a syphon with air tubing and inline air-valve to control the drip rate.