This is exact my case Mick.Dk,Happy to hear your breeding pair is improving each time......as long as they get better each time, there is hope they will finally success!
It is not unusual, that a pair that loose their eggs will spawn again within few weeks (sometimes days).Often a male will choose a different female, if unseccessfull several times ( if another female is present, ofcourse).
It is also very common, that even a successfull breeding pair will eat their fry, if the number is very low - and then use the gained energy to begin a new batch.....hopefully getting more offspring, thereby spreading their genes more.
It is unlikely, that your filter is the course of larvae on a leaf disappearing. They are actually attached by a small string of "glue" - re-attaching every time the parents pick them up for cleaning. I am sure parents ate them. When fry become free swimming, though, they are defenitely in danger from a strong filter. A sponge in front of in-let will safeguard the fry. Personally I usually shift to air-stone-flow for the first weeks of free swimming fry. Good waterchanges in short intervals will secure clean water anyway (fry do not care about high visualibility, though, their natural habitat is tea-coloured water. I have raised fry in serious green-water-algae tanks).
Thanks for the tips...will be helpful down the road for sure.Good to see success, finally.
Remember to feed "the kids" very well with the Artemia.........preferably 3 times spread over the time, ligjts are fully on.
It is really important, fry is eating all they possibly can, to develop their full potential. If they for some reason get a stop in growth at this stage......they will never fully recover, resulting in weaker and less vital fish.
Also give good space and water-quality at all times, during growing up. "Stacking" fry too close will result in stunted fins, among other things. A good oxygenation of water is important. Too high "stacking" and poor oxygenation will result in gill-plates not developing well, so pink of gills will be visual - a condition that will never correct as fish grow up.
Finally: at some time, fry will likely start to eat away fins of parents.....this is the time for "kids to move from home"...........
Too high "stacking" and poor oxygenation will result in gill-plates not developing well, so pink of gills will be visual - a condition that will never correct as fish grow up.
I think Mick was talking about there being not ENOUGH oxygen in the water as a consequence of there being too many fry in too small a volume of water. When we did it, through two batches of fry, after they outgrew the breeder boxes and were transferred to grow out tanks, I was massively over-filtering, doing 50% water changes daily and feeding BBS 3 to 4 times a day. There was also a ton of java moss and frogbit in all the tanks - which (with the benefit of hindsight) was probably the most important factor in getting all 200 odd to a decent size without the stunted finnage or other problems I so commonly see in commercially bred angels. I credit the ammonia take up of floating plants with this successThe "too high stacking", you meant "staggnated" or something about having too much oxygen in the water?
I have two breeding pairs of angels - breeding in the sense they lay eggs regularly, but non-breeding in the sense that neither pair seems to have the right genes for proper parenting behaviour for the whole duration. I have a 12 year old daughter who shares the hobby with me, so a year ago, having watched them screw up the process a dozen times or more, we decided to raise a batch of fry artificially just so she could see the fry grow out. I got breeder boxes to hang outside the tank and just cut off the leaf they had laid eggs on. This worked extremely well and I would say about 90% of free swimming fry made it to be taken to our LFS for store credit. This did involve getting hold of another four two foot tanks just to have the water volume for them to grow out in - that was a LOT of work!
Having done it once with both pairs I won't do it again, because I'm uncomfortable with spreading more fish without parenting genes in the hobby. Conversely in the future I would love to get hold of a true breeding pair and consolidate that behaviour because I think it would be as desirable to some hobbyists who like myself think its at least as important as how the fish looks if not more.
That all said, the most critical reason why the breeder boxes work so well is that the fry can easily find their food, in a relatively small space its always pretty close to them. They also benefit from having a relatively huge body of water cycling through the box with a powerful filter without any of the down sides: You can do huge water changes on the main tank without stressing the fry.
If I were to try it in a larger tank, the intake sponge is a must of course, but I would also pretty much cover the bottom in leaves (almond/oak) and java moss to make as much infusoria available as possible. Also in a larger tank where the fry have to actively hunt for food who have to work to get the food delivered to where the fry are. Directing a turkey baster squirt helps, but also in a dense layer of moss and leaf litter, it can also work to try a daphnia culture - the adults are too large for fry but you can sieve them out to make more daphnia and just put the tiny daphnia in. The huge advantage of this is that they won't die off in a few hours like BBS and may even continue to live for days until the fry or parents find them, meaning your water quality isnt being trashed by BBS die off.
Conversely I now keep my angels in their community tanks at quite low temps (24-25˚C) to slow down the breeding cycle and the aggression that come with it. This has helped to thicken up and grow the females who would otherwise expend all their energy on egg production. If I see signs that they may make it a few steps further in the parenting process then I'll be delighted but now they're about 3 years old this is pretty unlikely I believe.
Hope that helps
The Hikari-food I know of is for Koi-carps and based on wheat-grains=> plants. I would expect the fry of Scalare to need their animal-based food => Artemia.
In principle you can probaply use most crustations of acfeptable size........but Artemia is really by far the easiest to handle. Being salt-water based also eliminates risk of introducing "bad things" like parasites and the like. It does pollute water quite heavily, which must be counter-worked by water-changes. Growing up a batch of fry is - like said - really a lot of work........bit it is also a lot of fun and satisfaction.
- so in essense; yes - angel-fry do need their artemia as a starter-food. The artemia has a salry taste, which can create aversion to less salty food later in life. Therefore it is a good idea to "sneak in" a bit of very finely crushed, standard flakes at every serving of artemia. Fry will then usually get to eat this too.
Hi Madhav
The breeder boxes I used hang outside the tank, this makes observation very easy. As it happened my daughter is very into Warhammer models and I'd bought her a set of modeller's magnifying glasses for her birthday. These are fantastic for observing the fry.
Though they come setup to be air driven, (i.e. its air that lifts the water into the box and then the water overflows back into the main tank) I found this was very noisy, especially with two of them. I got a cheap micro-pump and used 8mm tubing to pump the water in, which was almost silent. Even such a tiny pump was too powerful so I added a third outlet to reduce flow, directing the water back to the main tank and allow for fine adjustment of the flow through the boxes. I'd also just switch the pump off for 15 minutes when I fed them.
If the desired outcome is to raise maximum numbers of fry then they are very effective, however I'd prefer to see the parenting behaviour in future as I said before.
Yes your high ambient temperature will definitely cause higher rates of breeding behaviour, you might want to deliberately allow them a cool down period during the winter - mine are quite happy at 23/24 ˚C and after about a year the females are noticeably bigger when I'd previously thought them fully grown because the frequency of egg laying is much less.
Be careful with your artemia - you will get quick hatching at 28/9˚C but I've read the batch can crash if it goes too much over 30˚C. Always have a back up ready.
I breed my apistos in planted tanks with various substrates: one sand, one Eco-complete (rubbish substrate btw) and one soil/walstad/dirted with gravel cap. Angels just need more space I would think: For example with one pair the male is so furiously protective of the eggs that he chases the female away - in a smaller tank I think he'd do her serious harm, but because she has dense plants to hide in out of sight three feet away, she's OK. Again with true parenting behaviour this should not be an issue and I know angel breeders use smaller tanks so as to make the feeding of the fry and the cleaning /water changes easier, but these are mostly bare-bottomed with maybe some java moss thrown in. They will also usually remove the parents after a while since once the pair start another breeding cycle their own fry become just another food source. It's critically important to think ahead and have a ton of hiding space and probably - even with good parents - some grow out tanks. Lastly remember that angels who are well conditioned can produce 300 to 500 eggs - if you successfully raise that kind of number who need to have a plan as to what the hell you're going to do with them!!
I'm grateful I "only" had 200 to deal with!
no - I mean you should not be tempted to put too many fish in too little water, even if you do a lot of water-changes (really should be self-evident). The fry will grow surprisingly fast and therefore need surprisingly lot of space in surprisingly short time.The "too high stacking", you meant "staggnated" or something about having too much oxygen in the water?
Finally: at some time, fry will likely start to eat away fins of parents.....this is the time for "kids to move from home"...........
remove them and feed them brine shrimp nauplii and crushed granules - the chances are the parents will try to spawn quite quickly