My Ocellaris breeding thread

[hbrochs]

Thank you

Thank you

Great thread, I'm about to try to raise my first clutch of black and white ocellaris. I read the whole thread and have a few questions.

Where did you buy the filter sponges? Or if they are diy, how do you make them?

When you transfer pods to the nursery, do you strain out the green water with a sieve? And then how do you get them off the sieve into the nursery?

Same question for the brine shrimp. Do you put the shrimp and its water in, or do you use a sieve and discard the water? Then do you use NSW to rinse the shrimp off the sieve into the nursery?

In prepping the nursery, do you seed it with rotifers a day or two before you transfer, or just on the same night you deliver the freshly hatched fry?

At one point you mentioned about skipping the fresh hatched brine shrimp for TDO A. That would certainly be easier to skip the whole brine shrimp hatching part, but I'll do it if thats the way to go.

Thanks very much,

Howard

 

[gavinsepanik]

Amazing thread! bump!

 

[ernieq]

Sorry, been away from the thread.

The sponge filters I bought from petsolutions.com Bought the Hydro Sponge model III (rated for 40 gallos).
I did not pre-seed the nursery. I actually moved water into the nursery the night of the hatch and installed a heater to keep the temperature identical to the display tank.

I Strain the rots with a sieve and then just place it upside down on the nursery tank just above the water surface and with a turkey blaster I squirt water on the screen and the rots just fall down into the tank that way.

Same with the brine shrimp, though with the brine shrimp I use a baby brine net.

You never put water into the nursery tank other than water that is either freshly prepared or from the hatch tank. Never put any rotifer colony water or brine shrimp hatch water.

The TDO instead of brine depends on your quality of your rotifer colony. If you can feed them rots until after meta, then you could possibly go to TDO directly. In my case the clowns had grown big enough to merit the switch, but optimally you want baby brine for 3 or 4 days as they grow really fast on it, then you mix in some TDO with the brine feedings.

 

[ernieq]

Also just to update my resulting batches from this thread. I lost like 60 of them on a major display tank disaster. Went on vacation for a couple of weeks and left one of those automated water top off systems. When I returned, the whole tank was dead. The darn thing failed on me, thus the overflow stopped working and stupid me didn't leave a sponge filter running like I usually do, so there was no water flow and thus all the fish basically suffocated.

I still have about 130 left, most of them now 3 years old and some over 3 inches in length. I have stopped selling to LFS because I want to sell them at the 3 inch size, so while selecting what I consider to be the best of the batch to keep for future breeding stock, I am waiting for the others to grow a bit more before I sell and keep "only" about 30 or so as a Harem.

 

[DanDashO]

Your pictures, especially those around meta, are fantastic! what camera and lens are you using?

 

[mwilliams62]

Thanks for the update Ernieq. I need to remember what you just mentioned about feeding the baby brine shrimp. I went from rots to TDO-A.

 

[ernieq]

Your pictures, especially those around meta, are fantastic! what camera and lens are you using?

It is actually just a canon point and shoot. It is an SX280HS. I did use a DSLR for a few shots and was using EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS, but most were done using the point and shoot.