The father usually will not eat his fry for 12-18 hours, so you should have enough time to remove him from the fry tank. This assumes he is solo in a fry tank before release. The timing of this seems to coincide with the first fish released, not the last one. Sometimes the fathers spit them all out in a few minutes, sometimes he takes his sweet time up to several hours releasing them all. If it takes him 12 hours to release them all, he becomes aggressive towards the fry pretty fast. I had one batch where papa took almost 14 hours to release them all (40 some...couldnt get an exact count) and he was chasing them within an hour. not trying to eat them yet, he still seemed to understand that they were not suppose to be food, but it wasn't going to be long before he started eating them. This is where the fry having cover is very important. They should have a place to go to hide. I use a fake plant that is weighted that has spacing between the 'branches' that is roughly the distance you would find on an urchin. The father almost always spits them out into these plants, and the babies seem to know to stay there until the father is gone.
Baby bangaii can be raised entirely on high quality frozen food. When I first started everyone said you had to feed them BBS, rotifers, etc... So I spent so much effort trying to feed them these types of things and I wound up with a 40% survival rate. Subsequent batches I have just focused on feeding them quality frozen foods that are shaved to their mouth size. The food is fed in a manner that they percieve it as moving. As long as the food is moving in a random pattern (I will let you figure out that part for yourself), they will strike it...sometimes eat it, sometimes not. Through frequency of feeding they quikckly adapt to eating froze food withing the first day or two.
I rarely have a loss in my broods anymore and I raise them with entirely frozen foods from first feed.
By 1 month they are eating small sized versions of exacly what the rest of my fish eat.
