Unusual bangaii pair ?

Wow, little hairs are standing up on the back of my neck :eek1: I will have you know, sir, that NOBODY feeds better that I do :smokin: NOBODY !!! I have a 5" black lyretail molly, a 3" neon goby (and that is the small one, my "cigar" as Edward Ramirez /LiquidLife/ called it was lost a few months ago), and a 4 year old bangaii that is about the size of a baseball :D My percs are larger than most ocellaris. I feed live RH fortified rotifers and bbs, frozen and freeze dried cyclops, Sally's Omega 3 frozen brine, masago and both Hikari and PE mysis. I don't even OWN any flake or pellet foods and the only dried food I have other than the freeze dried CE is the Otohime I just bought and I am NOT impressed with it. I grow out ocellaris to market size in 14 weeks. I simply can't imagine it's a nutritional issue unless for some reason bangaii's do better on Hartz Mountain :rolleyes:

Back when I was doing bangaii's seriously the feedback I got from other breeders confirmed the 12 month maturity. If there is info out there I missed I am all ears, please post the link(s).
 
David-
While i will not refute your feeding claims. The data is the data.
Feel free to read K Clarkes online article over at reefs.org (back in 97 or 98 i believe), he clearly shows 5-6 months

Also please read the cited article below --- I quoted the important stuff

"Age of maturity/ reproduction: Banggais began sexual maturation at about 5-6 month of age. The smallest female I found with signs of maturing oocytes was about 3.5 cm standard length (from the mouth to the beginning of caudal fin)."

--so David- just to show you how far & just I am-- I am adding a statement Alex made eariler in another article

"keep in mind that one thing is the size/ age at which the fish are capable of reproducing, and a different thing is when actually they do. Particularly, if they share a tank with other ( larger /older) specimens, the juveniles wont be in a position to compete and they will began reproducing, usually, not before 7-9 months after release."

Vagelli, A. A. & A. Volpedo. 2004. Reproductive ecology of Pterapogon kauderni, an endemic
apogonid from Indonesia with direct development. Env. Biol. Fish. 70:235-245.

Okay so given this...why is it taking your fry 12 months?
 
Got me stumped Frank, I thought it was the norm. I really doubt it's nutrition, and as for water quality pretty much everything I place in the system spawns so I take that as a good sign. I am wondering though if it may have to do with early nutrition which is why I started the other thread on second foods. Maybe the studies you sited were on wild populations?? Just a thought.

FWIW these month old babies I have are growing much faster than previous groups, I'm going now to post why in the "second food" thread.

Edit: BTW I just picked up the new "unusual" pair tonight, they are drip acclimating now. They are less than half the size of my large 4 yr male but substantially (2X) larger than the 11 month olds. The fellow was giving them to me, I just didn't feel right and gave him $40 I had in my pocket. I think they are worth $100 :D
 
Good luck with this next pair David. I just wish I could find pairs as easily as you folk do over there .....:)
 
Like I said above he was feeding 2x a week. I am feeding them 2x a day and they eat like there is no tomorrow :D Each one eats way more than my older & larger male. They eat masago too, that sort of blew my mind :eek1:
 
Congrats on your new pair David! I saw them in their previous tank, and was really amazed at how well they looked. One thing about his 20L - it was packed (and I mean packed) with corals. Maybe the pair liked the extra cover that the corals gave them.

I saw a pretty good sized Banggai at a LFS yesterday, my guess is that it was almost adult sized. Almost picked it up, but I have to move my tank in a week or two and didn't want to put it though the stress. I never did find any at the LFS you recommended, and lost the one Banggai I had.

I've got a fake urchin for you to try if you'd like - I'm pretty happy about how it looks. I've got a friend that will probably want clowns soon, so I'll be giving you a call.
 
Yes I saw the tank when I picked them up, he is right folks, it is packed :D I simply can't believe they bred in there but I guess the solitude plus that fact that it's in an office (so no disturbance 16 hrs daily plus weekends) helped a lot. Anyway they are eating like pigs in a 15 with some prolifera I gave them for cover. They are very close to eating from my fingers now, not shy at all.
 
I've got a nice fat female that you can have for the cost of shipping and some advice on catching her out of my reef tank without tearing everything appart. She's dropped eggs before, which is how I know its a she. She's also a ***** that likes to eat baby grammas while everyone else is sleeping.
 
Time for an update :) It occured to me last night as I was watching the pair that I have not ever read an account of the actual spawning process . Has it been described?? Or do we all just wake up one morning and discover that the male is magically holding :rolleyes: Here is what I saw:
The male was positioned in the center of the tank mid water, facing away from me. The female would slowly move right up along side him and quiver, not so much like a clownfish quiver, more subtle and mostly the anterior part of the body and the tail. As she did this she would slowly push him to one side, then she'd gently move around (going behind and beneath him) to the other side and quiver/ push back in the other direction. This would last maybe a minute or so? Then she'd swim off and cruise the tank, grab a mysis off the floor, go back and repeat the behavior. I watched this repeat at least 5 times before the lights went off. I was sure I was going to see the actual spawn. Now all this time the male remained motionless. When he finally did turn just slightly I swear he already had a mouth full of eggs. Does that make sense? Or maybe he was just puffing up to show off his big brood pouch? (seahorses do that so it's conceivable to me).
 
David,

I have seen a similar behaviour, however, I was not sure when the egg transfer happened.
I do know that she sure pushed him around a bit with the quivering.

I will be watching after the batch of eggs he has are released.

Waiting for a tripod for the camera too then may be video it !:)


Steve
 
Similar situation with me. However I had Frank explain it to me once... "Males fertilze the eggs outside of their mouth, then swallow." So it appears the female deposits the eggs somewhere, then the male fertilizes them and takes them into his mouth for incubation.

I have not witnessed that portion though one of the video's I linked to earlier here showed the same behavior David witnessed while the male had a mouthfull of eggs. The female was trying to entice him to take more eggs.
 
When I fed this moring he went straight for food which was disappointing, but I noticed he opend his mouth unusually wide to take in a brine shrimp and then he didn't eat again after that. So maybe they are in there? His mouth/ jaw doesn't really look any different. I'll check again when I go down to feed & clean.
 
David,

I notice that when the male is carrying, when I feed the tank, he goes to the area where the food is and seems to open and close his mouth. It is as if he is "drinking" from the food, but he does not take any solids.

Bless him, he will also face the front of the tank sometimes with his moth partially open and you can see a clump of something in there. Typically, I never have the camera there at the time. :(

Steve
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7337860#post7337860 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by StephenH
They will breed at 4-6 months, but the number of offspring is so low that it's hardly worth the effort.
Click to expand...

I am still in the process of reading that paper, looks promising though. I have to take exception with your comment about low numbers being hardly worth the effort.

IMO any number of captive raised Bangaii (or any other ornamental for that matter) is WELL worth the effort. I realize you probably meant in regards to a single species breeding facility ...but still that kind of remark tends to make the hairs on my neck stand up.

So far I am enjoying the paper you linked to .... thank you for that!
 
Spk- that sounds like what I saw. I didn't feed them last night, was running late and they are low on the priorities list when I'm behind (larvae first, then juvies, then adults :cool: ). However I did notice that he has retreated deep into the caulerpa forrest and is staying there so I'm pretty sure he's holding.

SteohenH- this is great, well done :D i only got through the first few pages but will read the rest tonight. So far I love it. I totally concur with pair selection approach 2 and would like to add that IME if one is male it will dance and strut around a lot when it first spies the female.

I have 4 at just about one year in a 40 gallon tank with 9 bluestreak cardinals and some other assorted fish, I have been waiting for them to pair off. Now I'm thinking I should split them up for a few weeks in small tanks and then try matching them 2 at a time, maybe that will get me faster results?
 
David- great to see your still up late at nite-watching those pesky fish. As for the egg transfer, i thouyght I wrote about it in the 97 reefs.org article, nevertheless Alex vagelli has it outlined in his 1999 article, but the good news is Matt (MWP) has a video of a similar egg exchange from another set of apogons and its virutually identical to that of banggias. The egg transfer takes place in milliseconds and the sperm cloud is released almost simultaneously.


Stephen Hopkins-
great job on the manual. I wish you great success w/ the fish. You methods seem much more straight forward than I ever did, but then again I was pioneering back in 96, and didn't have access to ponds. However i feel your assessment of cost/return ratios are not quite correct, plus if you had a chance to read that I and others have been advocating stripping males of fry and using eggs tumblers (perfected by coral dynamics-but the prototypes were floating around here (Guy W) for a few yrs).
Lastly, I'm disappointed you left out the breeders registry article from your citations. It was the first report of successful spawning of these fish in captivity, while it was written in 96, some of it still hold true. Anyway- Fantastic job. I'd love to discuss it sometimes w/ you.
frank
 
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Just read that article Stephen! I was especially interested in your description of the male actively pulling the eggs from the female - it sounds very similar to what I observed in Apogon margaritophorus (the vid is lurking around somewhere...) A VERY strange way for the male to take the eggs! I was convinced the female was having problems (i.e. being egg-bound) and maybe she was, a little, when I got to witness the extended spawning. Normally the transfer, as everyone else has stated, happens almost instantaneously.

MP
 
Frank,

I am sincerely sorry the Breeder's Registry paper did not show up in the literature cited. I wrote the description of my methods without any literature citations back in '04 and posted that version of the document on my web site. Clyde wanted to turn it into a University of Hawaii Sea Grant Technical Report and had his department's librarian do a literature search and send him all the banggai publications. She does this for a living, but I do not know which databases she uses and, evidently, Breeders Registry does not show up on any of them. Thus, when Clyde wrote the background material and inserted the literature citations, he did not have and did no know about the Breeder's Registry paper. This might be an issue the Breeder's Registry people want to look into and it might be a consideration for anyone thinking about publishing there.

Someone is going to have to explain the advantage of stripping eggs. The males do a pretty good job of incubating eggs without having to fiddle around with the process.

The economic data is what it is.

-steve
 
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