Landlords Log - Breeding Gold Striped Maroon Clowns

Day 8 - Well after another little die off I think I am down to maybe 40 fish. I made a rookie mistake and let the ammonia get to far out of control in the larval tank. It was like at .2 or something. Was higher than I should have let it get. So after a 50 percent WC and the addition of some ammonia remover we'll see what happens to the remaining little fellas. Hopefully the strong will survive and I will be able to raise the rest of these guys past meta. I think the ammonia stunted their growth because they are just so tiny :)

Have a Great Day!

Kurt
 
Came home to a total loss, I have no idea what killed them all . I am gonna check the heater tomorrow with a voltmeter for stray voltage only thing i can think of .Salinity was correct water from MT and my rotifiers are going strong. Either way they should have been living off there yolk sacs they barely made a day. If it is the heater it would make sense why my last batch died overnight when they where doing so well.I really can't think of anything else they weren't in the tank long enough for ammonia to be a problem..... Dam i am bummed i need to figure it out if it isn't the heater I will be at a loss.

Hope yours is going better.

At least i still have my grow out system GSM's doing fine
 
Things I check for on a "day after" total loss are as follows in this order:

1. Ammonia in the larval tank. I personally use the larval tank for the week prior to placing in the larva as a place to cultivate rotifers, so ammonia can become an issue for me. I use the Seachem ammonia bades becuase they make it pretty easy to tell what's up.

2. Salinity
3. Temperature differences between Broodstock tank and larval tank
4. pH differences

Lastly a trick I used on the first night, and subsequent nights was to simply leave an actinic PC bulb on 24 hours. I seemed to get less loss when doing so.

I also found out that when collecting with a siphon, which I do, sometimes the collection bucket would cool down before I was done collecting thus caused a temperature shock when I dumped the fry into the larval tank. I now dump them in more regularly instead of all at once.

Just some thoughts

Good Luck - Kurt
 
Day 9 - No more noticeable losses yesterday. Ammonia is slowly coming back down in the larval tank. Not a ton of growth yet, but they are bigger than about a week ago. I am not thining that rotifers alone are going to cut it with GSM's. Going to continue it with this batch just to see where it leads me but I think artemia rearing is in my near future.

:) Kurt
 
well done with the GSM's Landlord,ive got about 20 at 3 weeks old atm in with some month old ocellaris just a couple of things ive found with GSM's;

leave the lights on overnight after they hatch so they get a chance to feed up (this has reduced my early losses)

typically they hatch day 5 or 6 that first picture you put up with the flowerpot i would have hatched that night

co culture your rotifers with your larvae and greenwater/rotifer diet

i, like you, miss out artemia totally,they are much more trouble than their worth and with such small larvae its very easy to blow them up,ground up dry food is taken readily from day6 ime
 
I could not imagine feeding ground up dry at Day 6. My fry are still no bigger than maybe 6 millimeters in length. I do not think that their mouths are even big enough for grade A Otohime??? As for the other things you have mentioned. I do them all :)

Thanks

Kurt

r.d.m said:
well done with the GSM's Landlord,ive got about 20 at 3 weeks old atm in with some month old ocellaris just a couple of things ive found with GSM's;

leave the lights on overnight after they hatch so they get a chance to feed up (this has reduced my early losses)

typically they hatch day 5 or 6 that first picture you put up with the flowerpot i would have hatched that night

co culture your rotifers with your larvae and greenwater/rotifer diet

i, like you, miss out artemia totally,they are much more trouble than their worth and with such small larvae its very easy to blow them up,ground up dry food is taken readily from day6 ime
Click to expand...
 
if you go down the path of artemia - get decap'd eggs. I used that starting day 5 and knock on wood no losses (of course I only had 5 babies to being with on day 5). I got mine from brineshrimpdirect. Jury rig a small hatchery - keep in 80 bath and within 12~24 hrs you have a buzzing mass of bbs.

My clowns are spoiled - they only like the bbs and will take a few bites of cyclopeeze and look at me like - what is this? :lol:

Anyways - love the thread. I went with artemia to raise my clowns but the dry-food method seems like the way to go.
 
Am trying to avoid them at all costs :lol: all I need is another chore to do daily. I'm up to at least an hour of daily breeding tank room stuff. Combined with my LIFE, I'm running out of hours.

:) Kurt
 
Day 14 - Nothing really exciting going on with the babies. The are still very small and do not appear to have entered meta yet. Again I believe that using rotifers as a single food source is just not going to cut it. I do still have about 20-30 fish left. The ammonia has begun to stabilize so I am not very concerned about it. Will be picking up the necessary supplies to try growing out some artemia so as to have a better food source available to the fry.

The parents laid another huge nest on the flower pot last Saturday and that is good news. Looksl like I may get to try this again and see if I can better control the ammonia and the larval tank.

:) Kurt
 
Day 16 - Well I am starting to see what I believe to be the first headstipres on some of the individuals. They are still so small though and I am feeding them both rotifers and Oto A, which I cannot say they are eating yet. Ammonia is under control and I hope to take these remaining fish to some form of completion.

I will also get to test a larval snagger that I built on the nest currently in the broodstock tank this weekend. Should be great fun!

Thanks for reading

:) Kurt
 
All seens well. I like that you keep reminding us how small they are. Unless you see these little maroons in person, the pictures just don't show their true size. When I would remove the snagger from my DT, my wife would say "too bad you didn't catch any tonight". Then I would shine the flashlight in the snagger and show her hundreds. LOL They are so small I have to put on my reading glasses to see them. Or I'm I just getting old ? LOL
Anyways, thanks for the updates !
 
Day 17 - I decided to do a big water change yesterday evening and noticed for the first time that these little guys are getting their stripes. FINALLY! Some have one, others two. They are only visible when looking down onto the tank and they could have had them for some time but since I never really take the top off the tank I never noticed. Anyways I am thrilled about it. Looks like after the water change I may have about 15 fish in the tank.

I am really looking forward to trying out another batch this weekend. I will have a brine shrimp outfit in full production so I hope to have a more valuable food source handy and in good numbers by the time the next batch hatches.

I read through my old Tomato thread and realized that I should probably be more diligent on doing water changes in the larval tanks. I got lazy and simply let them go which I believe didn't help in keeping the water quality up. I will be exercising more caution next time around.

Tonight I will be going to listen to Anthony Calfo speak at a local reef club event about breeding fish so it should be a great learning experience. Cannot wait for it!

Thanks

:) Kurt
 
Day 21 - Well this batch of fish is getting smaller and smaller. Seems like they would go through meta, get a stripe, and die. I tried an all rotifer diet to get them through meta but it must not have been suitable nutrition for them to thrive. I got some BBS over the weekend and started hatching 'em out. The remaining 7 fish (probably lacking developmentally) are now eating as much nhbbs as they can get their mouths around. We'll see if these last few thrive.

On another note I began collecting fry from the latest hatch (last night) Set up the larval snagger and it seemed to do pretty good. Looks to have caught all the early hatchers (about 20 of them) Looks like this wil be another multi-day hatch like the last one. In any case I am going to go about 3-5 days on rotifers and then start introducing nhbbs to see if I can get these guys a bit healthier than the previous group.

Take Care

:) Kurt
 
His talk was very good, but I would have rather picked his brain, that man has a lot to tell and was only able to scratch the surface and leave me with more questions.
 
Breeding.

I agree - it was hard to get into any depth with a large audience and varying levels of experience.

--Ed
 
Well my larval snagger worked like a charm last night. I believe that I captured well over 200 fry. Popped them suckers right into a half full 5.5 gsallon tank and left an actinic lamp on over the tank. This time around I decided to darken the fish room around 6:00 PM so I could get some decent sleep. Worked very well.

So it look like my GSM's are taking 9 days from laying to the hatch, so far the time between to the next hatch is kind of a mystery of about a week or so. The larval snagger is a blessing in sooooo many ways. Just makes the process of collection so much less painful. I did suffer a few losses in the device when I wasn't actively dumping out babies. I believe at one point there were a few dudes totally stuck to the mesh from the pressure of their buddies. Now that I have hnbbs on hand I am hoping to get much higher-meta survival rates. Time will tell.

Back to the previous batch - Got 7 left and after introduction of the bbs these guys have made a 180 degree turn around. No longer swimming in circles just seem more "with the program". Glad I decided to bite the bullet and get brine. On a side note regarding the brine shrimp I decided to try out a product from brineshrimpdirect. It's this saucer shaped hatchery that uses no light or aeration, pretty slick device. It has its drawbacks (like not getting a boat load of nhbbs at a specific time for the most nutrition) but it is so darn easy. I like simple products and things that have no moving parts..... This device fits the bill. As long as you do not mind scooping out nhbbs every hour (takes a millisecond to do) you can get a pretty large number of brine out of this spaceship looking thing. Very satisfied!

Have a Great Day!

Kurt
 
i saw that thing - I thought it was a gimmick. So it worked eh? I don't get how you get the bbs out without a net. Also it works without heating?

c'mon you have to share more...:D
 
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