How to breed clams....

lebowski

lebowski

Notorious Reeferus
I have two maxima's right now, and I was wondering how to get them to breed... IF they ever let out their stuff.... How do I get them to have babies??? Are there female and male clams???

I want to breed some teardrops... If I could, I'd definetly sell these teardrops for like 80 each...:D ..
 
Great thought, but it is not going to happen in your tank, or home setup.

You would need access to open water, and tons of money to get started. So your $80 figure would be more like $800.

There is someone here who has got them to spawn through injecting them, but has not had any success at raisng them.

This practice is best left to commercial farmers, in the tropics.

Believe me, I wish I could have successfully bred some of the clams I have seen.

Yes there are male and female clams.

By the way, if you can breed them, you can quit high school.

LOL
 
I remember reading in a thread here a while back that you would have to kill several dozen (if not hundreds) of clams to get the algae from them for the spawn of new clams.

Can't quite remember how it went.

The jist was: Not a chance at home.
 
It would be very involved and much easier in large systems with large clams and as SeanT was kinda describing, they need to get zooxanthellae to start off from other clams so pieces of mantles are cut and blendered etc and then often centrifuged to get the zooxanthellae separate and use that to let the small ones gain their symbiotic algae.
 
Firstly, gender: Clams first develop as males (2-3 years for maximas) then secondly as females (7-9 years) but still possessing male gonads meaning as mature "females" they can produce eggs and sperm but spawn separately to avoid self fertilisation.

Secondly, fertilisation: It is difficult to get the right concentrations of sperm and eggs, clams are highly suscptable to polyspermy (fertilisation by two or more sperm) which renders them useless.

Thirdly, zooxanthellae innoculation: As mentioned, this usually involves taking mantle tissue and blending it before centrifuging the zoox which are then used to seed the juvenile clams. There are other methods but this is the easiest and most commonly practised.
In the wild, clams are constantly releasing zooxanthellae as their populations grow and conditions change. In a controlled environment such as an aquarium, conditions do not change often and so fewer zoox are released. The amount that would be free living in your tank would be too little to effectively innoculate a batch of juvenile clams.
 
your first step would be to get a bigger tank. A spawning event in a 29 gal would almost certainly create a cespool in a matter of hours.
 
i saw vids of it being done in the pacific raising areas, like marshall islands, but it's involved, needs big clams, many water changes, only doable next to an ocean, few survivors, etc. will search for the link
 
After wading through 160+ pages of papers it appears breeding clams is very easy if you have access to cheap labor, several clams (a few have to be sacrificed every fertilization), blender, syringes, microscope, assorted lab stuff and a business model that allows you to wait 16-18 months for a product ;)

Heck, don't we all have this laying around :D I could swipe all but the clams and business model from work. :D
 
I think some are making this sound more complicated than it really is. Just because its done on a commercial ial farm doesn't mean it can't be done small scale(55+gal tank). Alot of you are making assumptions that clearly 99% of us have no clue about. Do you need all that equipment to get some clams growing.... no, does nature.... There are other ways to get them to breed without killing them. If I can find the PDF ill post it but what they did was sat them out in the sun to stress them out and then put them back in the water. Almost always it caused them to reproduce.

What I think should be done is more analyzing, less BS. Like for instance, how old do they have to be to reproduce, how can we get a concentration of zoo in there so we don't have to blend a clam, things like that. We mimic the sun all the time in our tanks to grow coral and raise clams in our tanks so that shouldn't be an issue.

I just bought 2 clams today and I'm def going to give it a shot as long as it doesn't involve blending my clams.

Housing mivcosoes and such, that's for when you are getting really serious and pushing it beyond a hobby. Sure we would all like to make some money off our tanks but that's not why we started the hobby. Go into business if you want to go so in-depth as to use a microscope. Let nature take its course in your home system and sell whatever does get created. You get what I'm saying. Its late, sorry if I don't get my point across.
 
the point you are neglecting is that yes, some clams spawn in home tanks, but their release of sperm/eggs is massive and can easily pollute the tank. you should hope the 2 you bought don't do it, not the other way around.
 
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