L134, Males dropped Odontodes, spawning season over?

[Jobro]

Hey folks,

My L134 were on a spawning frenzy from January to May.

I did not get a spawn for a longer period. It is a group of 6 (3/3). So I took a closer look and noticed, that the color of the males went from whiteish back to the well known yellow and that they dropped all of their odontodes on the back of their bodies.
The males also put on a lot of body masses. two of the males look almost like the females now. It's insane, because they were really thin during the spawning period.

My females are definitely still gravid, they hang around the boys' houses waiting to party again. But my males seem to be unwilling.

Now I know, if I just wait another 6 months until it's January again, they will probably start off for another round.
But to be honest I would like to get them going earlier.

When they stopped spawning, Water temp was at about 28°C. PH 6, Conductivity 100ms.

Since it is pretty hard to get even softer water in there I decided to do some waterchanges with harder water and once they got used to that, I'm planning on giving them some rainy season with lots of soft and cold water.
I pushed the conductivity to something around 500ms now and PH of above 7.

Since the males and females are both pretty "healthy" I guess the feeding regime is fine. But maybe I should make some changes? Like less food for a period to stimulate a change of season?

From what I read, they should get triggered to spawn, going from harder to softer water. But I am not sure if it will work, when the males are not ready yet, e.g. not having odontodes on the tail.

Will they start growing the odontodes during the rainy season or should I keep up the dry season until the odontodes come back and start with the cooler softer waterchanges from there?

So, does anybody have any ideas on how to get my males back on track?

This is less about maximizing the offspring but more about knowing how to get the fish going and how to stimulate seasons and especially finding out what the triggers are.

[MarcW]

I tried for about 10 months to trigger L134 using RO water mixed with my very hard tap water. Targeting parameters which sound similar to yours.

After 10 months of no activity I gave up going to the fish store every week to get RO (before I had my own unit), and just gradually adjusted them back to my tap water. pH 7.8-8, 330+ TDS, then a few weeks later they had their first spawn with great survival rates. I never noticed any odontodes being dropped, I have heard in the past that some may do this due to stress of shipping or something similar. Have you had any water or temperature fluctuations recently?

Unfortunately we moved house not long after that and I sold the group, I wish I had kept hold of them.

[Jobro]

During December I had them on pretty soft and accidic water. Since the Rainwater drops to really low temps during Winter, I then did a Waterchange with hard alcalic Tap water. This started the breeding frenzy in January.
I followed up with my regular rainwater 50%WC and the breeding kept going until May. I did not change temperature nor water chemistry. Because, you know, when they give you a spawn every 2-3 weeks you don't want to change anything

Nothing happened during June. And now in July all the oodontdes were gone.
What is even stranger: The youngest male was not in on the breedings at all. He only developed strong odontodes at the end of May and I was expecting to start seeing some spawns from him soon. Now he, like the other suddenly lost all the odontodes.

Now for the last 7 days I did two waterchanges with tap water to raise hardness and stimulate a dry season by reducing flow in the hope to see odontodes growing back soon. But to be honest, this is just a relatively desperate attempt, since I have no clue what would trigger them to grow or lose odontodes again.

[MarcW]

From a quick search, I found a post from Shane on this forum (over 10 years ago!) where he said that several species grow and lose odontodes according to their breeding seasons.

Hopefully this is what happened and they will grow back and start breeding again in January, good luck!

[Jobro]

Yeah I would assume it is something like that. Though I did not read any about this in one of the many L134 breeding reports I went through. They only state "males will get hairy when ready to spawn" or thel ikes but they never mention the hairs dropping afterwards again.

[Fundulopanchax76]

Hi all ! I hear for first time about loosing of odontodes ! Which other species do this, if somebody knows ?

[Jobro]

Hi all ! I hear for first time about loosing of odontodes ! Which other species do this, if somebody knows ?

This is why I opened this thread. I would like to know more about this as well...

[pleco_breeder]

All of them will lose them if conditions aren't right. It could mean the males aren't in condition, or could be something off with water quality. Either way, I wouldn't expect any sort of spawning till after the male has re-grown them.

[Jobro]

I have apistogramma spawning and raising fry in this tank, so I guess water quality should be good, since as far as my experiences go, their eggs would go bad if the water wasn't pretty good.

It also smells good. haha yeah I know, aquarium water never smells good. But you smell when something is off with a tank.

[Jobro]

My L134 have regrown all their odontodes during the last 2 Months. And this morning I find one of them trapping a female.

They started spawning last year during winter and stopped at around May/June. That's when they dropped their odontodes.

I am inclined to believe they are seasonal spawner and dropping the odontodes during their lazy months might be a natural thing, which might just not have been obeserved a lot.

Anyway:

Peckoltia Compta trapping

[panaque]

I noticed the same when I had a breeding group of this species. The spawning period was always from Oct/Nov to Feb/March. Outside the spawning they would lose the odontodes and I could always predict when spawning was going to start again from the reappearance of hairy tails.

[bekateen]

How odd then that my first compta spawn was in August. That said, I had a few obvious males then with good odontodes, and since then I've had trouble finding the males (can't find any fish with strong odontodes). That said, I recently noticed one male with weak odontodes. Maybe they'll start back up spawning. I'd like that.

Cheers, Eric

[Jobro]

Looks like it was not due to bad water conditions or the like, as someone had implied back when I asked about this for the first time.

Good luck with them spawning, Eric!

Looks like my pair was not ready, yet. He trapped her for a day, but no eggs =(

[Tony4143]

Wow that is just wild, lol also good info and something to monitor as far as seasonal breeders. Thanks for all the updates Jobro
Tony

[Jobro]

Two out of the three males are sitting on eggs right now

looks like a pretty seasonal occurrence to me. They seem to get triggered by rainfall/snow, too, since we had quite some lately.

How do these fish know about seasons? It was last year just around new years, that they began and now it is close to Christmas again. What season is in Amazonia around this time of the year? Should be rainy season?

Are there any good write-ups on how fish could possibly know about storm and rain outside, while they are kept in a tank? Is it just barometric pressure?

If so:
The equatorial belt is a constant low pressure area, right? Maybe the fish are reacting positively to a more natural barometric pressure? But the barometric pressure in Central Europe is in a state of continuous changes. I would expect the fish to spawn less seasonal and more opportunistic during any low pressure periods in Europe. But somehow they only do it during winter on me.

I know all of this is biased on poor statistics, mainly my own. But I really wonder if and how they can know seasons in their tank?

I also lowered water temp from 28.5°C to about 26°C about 2 weeks ago. But they were showing odontodes and lots of interest in spawning even before that.

[philippe31]

I obtained same conclusions as yours with L333
I think that a big depression, a storm, triggers the egg-laying, and after several cycles are observed, then a pause of a few months occurs.
It was just an observation I never shared because, as you, I am not very sure of my stats ^^