Yellow head jawfish spawning

From what I read, I thought they were supposed to hatch at dawn?
Well at dawn of day 7 (counting day 1 is day the eggs first appeared) nothing. But at 2:30pm, a few individuals started to be spit out like once a minute. I grabbed what I could before I had to leave. This morning the rest were gone before dawn, so the tank got thoroughly fed. Sun Corals were really happy.

I only collected 3 fully healthy fry from this batch, but that's probably for the best - my parvocalanus pod culture is starting to gain traction, but it's so immature: really hard to find nauplii in there. So I'll be surprised if any of the 3 fry survive to see their siblings in the next clutch.
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Awesome! Hopefully they don't starve

Thanks. We'll see. They seem right now to hunt more along the bottom of the tank. So I took a sample from the bottom - euplotes ciliates and a few pod nauplii. Would be very interesting if the fish are actually eating ciliates too.
I don't think I'll put a healthy one under microscope to see what it's been eating since there's only 3. Maybe next batch.

Temperature
I had heater set at 80 on one side of tank and thermometer on other side reading 78, and the fish hung out close to the heater all day, so I upped the heater temp to 82.
 
Lost all 3 fry within 48hrs. So many things not ideal it's hard to say what got them. Temp overshot so thermometer on far side of tank from heater read 84. Food availability and water quality also suspect.

But female is fat with eggs again so we'll see how it goes.

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One clue that spawning is about to happen is digging a deep pit outside the tunnels. Presumably that's where the spawning takes place.
This pit (front left) was freshly re-dug today.
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Here's a shot of how much sand was dug out today
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Wow did not realize they spawn so soon after the first time? What intensity of light do you have for the 14H perjodv


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Wow did not realize they spawn so soon after the first time? What intensity of light do you have for the 14H perjodv

"Spawn Time of Day: Dusk
Dates of Consecutive Spawns: 3/23/16 for the spawn documented here. Approximately every 10-11 days a new spawn is recorded."
from thread on mbi

If last spawn was on Friday (I found male with eggs Sat), then tomorrow evening would be 10 days.

Such a short turnaround. If my pod culture doesn't whip into shape miraculously, I'll likely skip trying to do anything with this next batch and focus on getting my act together on the live food cultures.

Light:
I think my light intensity is like 56 watts of sucky LEDs + direct morning sun.
there's I believe 24 watts of sucky LEDs that are on for the 14hrs.
 
So at least the phytoplankton part of the live culture is working like it should.
T-Iso (Tisochrysis lutea): left is on 2/15, right is today 2/20.

I know that's still not dense by culture standards, but I split it for redundancy. Inoculated 2 sterilized .5L batches (with f/2 strength) and a test tube to save culture in case of crash.

Phase 1 is looking solid. 3 separate cultures + backup. 2 L total.

Now on to Phase 2: Can I get more than a few sprinklings of these parvocalanus crassirostris pods?
 

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What resource are you using to plan your culture cultivation? Fingers crossed for some parvo

Here's what I've been reading on parvocalanus - and they are so versatile for raising larval fish, I think it'd be of interest to a lot of people.

#1
http://www.mbisite.org/Forums/tm.aspx?&m=79048&mpage=1
Lots of good info - can skip over the discussions of carbon per volume in cultures. Bottom line: we feed too much. Pics in there of what constitutes appropriate food amount, and its impossible to make myself feed that little T-Iso. :)

#2
"Development of intensive copepod culture technology for Parvocalanus crassirostris: Optimizing adult density"
Good stuff on optimal culture composition/splitting etc.
Headlines: "Fecundity decreased from 26 eggs per female per day at an adult density of 0.25 per mL to less than 1 egg per female per day when operated at 8 adults mL."
also see the attached pic from study. Suggest to me to split (or remove adults) once ~1 adult/mL is reached, if we're going for max growth.

#3
http://www.mbisite.org/Forums/tm.aspx?&m=82828&mpage=1
more discussion of feeding levels - how much parvo can I support with these bottles of T-Iso?
also discussion of co-cultures and using different filter sieve sizes - when ciliates etc creep up in a parvo bucket.
 

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Here's the pic of goal food levels according to thread #1 in last post.
Fed with T-Iso on the left, unfed on the right.
It looks like nothing and on top of that, the poster in the thread says that his cultures that get fed least are the ones that do the best.
 

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10 days after first spawn, male has another mouth full of eggs this morning.
Spawns on evenings of 2/10 & 2/20.
 
Awesome! I've been too sleep deprived to read those articles properly but hopefully will be able to soon! Thanks for them. Will be following the second batch
 
One step forward, two steps back last couple of days.
Parvo pods are progressing I think. Slowly. Three containers with parvo pod populations that I've managed to avoid overfeeding. Probably 3/4 a gallon total, and much less than 1 adult per mL.

Two steps back... male decided he would eat the eggs yesterday. Not sure how. I fed him so much I figured he was too fat to eat the eggs. That pig proved me wrong.

And my T-iso...
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It's not gold anymore, it's rapidly turning green, microscope shows it contaminated. I waited too long to split and make backup cultures, so those are contaminated too, though not as thoroughly. Probably will stay mostly live T-iso for one more day. I also have some phycopure copepod blend that's refrigerated. Although not ideal, it'll keep the parvo pods alive until I can reestablish clean T-iso.
Sigh.
Apparently there's a reason people don't breed jawfish all the time.
 
I'm going to post things related to the culturing of the microfoods in the microfoods thread, and post in here stuff more directly related to the jawfish.

The Chromis in my tank harasses the jawfish (and everyone else in the tank) and most of the activity around the jawfish tunnels involves defending them from the chromis harassment all day long. It's always been this way, but nonetheless I'm thinking it's time for the chromis to go. I'm thinking perhaps the swallowing of the eggs might have had something to do with the constant harassment of the chromis.
So maybe I'm going fishing with a real tiny hook today.
 
Yes my plan to for my (future currently nonexistent) jawfish is to have them be basically the only fish in the tank. All I have now are mollies


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Yes my plan to for my (future currently nonexistent) jawfish is to have them be basically the only fish in the tank.

That would simplify things definitely.
By my count 2-3 days until next batch of eggs. I feel like removing the chromis is necessary to bring down stress level in the tank. Chromis is too suspicious to be caught by even a tiny hook.
Plan B is to take advice I heard long ago: train fish to eat from a container, so you can catch any fish whenever you need.
It takes time.. Yesterday only one fish went in on purpose, one on accident. Today, two fish in on purpose, two briefly in on accident.
Algae Blenny this evening decided that if there was a food bucket, he would live in it (part time, at least).
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Progress.
 
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