Amblydoras nauticus spawned

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I may have missed it but how are you collecting them?
-Shane

I'll make a video of the siphoning next time I collect eggs.

Cheers, Eric

Please do. I have been working with some tetra spp (rummynose and wild Bleeding Hearts) to build up some nice schools for Chewy's tank. Your method would seem to work for them as well.
-Shane

I've been travelling a lot between mid-May and mid-July, and I'm finally home for the summer and able to focus attention on my fish again. With that, I've also finally had another Amblydoras nauticus spawn two days ago. Was able to video my process yesterday while I recovered the eggs. I hope the video is self-explanatory and helpful. I also added a 4 month update on the oldest 4 fry, which are still doing well but growing oh, so slowly!

As an aside, I'm a bit relieved to find so many bad eggs even at the moment of collection, which means the cloudy eggs may already exist before I harvest them and thus maybe my harvesting method is not solely responsible for eggs turning white. Also, this time I did wait a day to collect the eggs, so that if there were bad eggs at the time of spawning, some of those may disintegrated before I harvested. It's still possible that some of the eggs I observed as bad may have died when I lifted the mop out of the tank, although it's obvious from my video that there are white bad eggs just floating around in the tank, no fault of mine.

I had good hatching last time from that big spawn, but still eventually lost all the fry, I think because the food fell through the floor of the German breeder ring. So this time I will hatch the eggs in the ring, them move the fry to a solid-floor box with a silk fabric cover over the outlet sponge so that fry can't burrow into the sponge and die inside the sponge.

Hopefully I'm successful!

Cheers, Eric

Amblydoras nauticus Collecting eggs through a false floor

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Eggs are developing nicely.

Cheers, Eric

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Eggs hatched overnight, so I moved fry from German breeder ring to a Fluval breeder box with a silky fabric cover over the sponge blocking the exit. Hopefully this keeps the babies safe and doesn't either clog the outflow or allow babies to get stuck.

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Here's the oldest/biggest baby. Now 4 months old, 20mm SL.

It appears to have a damaged left pectoral spine. Don't know how long ago that happened - maybe snagged in a sponge or net when it was smaller?

Cheers, Eric

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Another spawn today, with a few eggs also collected in the mop and potted plant.

This time, I collected a total of 9 "good looking" eggs in the mop and pot, but 6 of them were cloudy within an hour. Obviously there's something about that process (Being in air? Being handled? IDK) that they don't like.

I collected 206 good eggs and an additional 18 bad eggs (already bad in the tank) using the hose to siphon the false floor.

As I cleaned up the eggs and separated the sand and debris from them, I discovered that I sucked up a dead baby (likely from an unrecovered egg belonging to the previous spawn which hatched July 25) from the parents' tank. Without microworms, the fry don't last in the parents' tank.

Also, among the bad eggs, I found two like this. They appear intensely white with an amber center, rather than being overall cloudy. I think these two were in the process of dying when I saw them.

In total, 209 good eggs are in the breeder ring tonight!

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Today I inspected the 209 good eggs which I collected yesterday and placed in a German breeder ring. I found only 4 bad eggs this morning from the 209 eggs added to the breeder ring. Collectively I'm still at 88% survival of the initial 233 eggs I collected. Hopefully these remaining 205 eggs all hatch.

Cheers, Eric

[characinkid]

Thats really interesting Eric, congratulations on another spawn.

Are you doing anything special with the eggs apart from putting them in a breeding ring? Any treatment, leaves etc?

[bekateen]

Thanks!

I have dried oak leaves in the breeder ring while they hatch, although I don't think these leaves are significantly affecting water chemistry, since there are only about 5-10 leaves and the ring is in a 20 gallon tank.

Once the fry are all hatched, then I'll move them all (with their leaves) to a Fluval hang-on breeder box, with a sponge block covering the outlet to prevent clogging of the outlet, and a silky fabric over the sponge, to prevent babies from swimming into the sponge and getting stuck. That's when I'll start feeding them live microworms.

I started using this design on the last spawn from a couple of weeks ago, and I still have (I think) dozens of fry remaining from that spawn. Today I did a box cleaning on that Fluval from the prior clutch of fry, and I pulled out 4 or 5 dead fry. Not great, but way better than in the past, since until now, other than the last spawn, I have only four total fry growing from the first few spawns. Unfortunately, I didn't count the eggs from the late July spawn, but it didn't look like a big spawn. So although "dozens" of fry wouldn't be great survival from 209
eggs, it might be pretty good if I started from, e.g., 60-75 eggs.

Hopefully yesterday's spawn and the late July spawn are a turning point for me in terms of successfully raising a significant number of fry.

Cheers, Eric

[bekateen]

Update. No new spawns, but 2-3 weeks ago I did find a lot of dead babies in the breeder box, still managing to effectively commit suicide by burrowing around the foam, even if they can't get in the foam.

So I went a different way. I moved the fry from both spawns (now about 40 and 25 days old, respectively) to a 5.5 gallon tank with just oak leaves, an airstone and heater. No filtration.

I do every-other-day water changes using RO water blended with water from the parent's tank so that I don't have to mess with dechlorinator chemicals.

To date, from those two spawns, I have 17 survivors and sadly I found one dead in the tank. I don't know if it was dead already or if it died because of the process of water changes. I try to be gentle and slow, but these babies seem so delicate.

It's slow progress, but I'm getting better at improving survival.


Here's a video of them: https://youtu.be/AHPvwUJVX6g/

And for comparison, here are the four oldest babies, some 4 months old and one 5 months old: https://youtu.be/9aAXMes0hHY/

[Jools]

Love it, baby thorns!

Jools

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I found more eggs yesterday. For some inexplicable reason, the egg-catching false floor was flooded with silt-like mulm (I've never had this happen before), so the eggs are covered with it. Also, lots of eggs are obviously bad already, something else I've never seen at this level when the eggs are still in the tank.

I collected the eggs as usual and attempted to rinse them in repeated flushes of clean tank water.

Believe it or not, the two photos above are from AFTER I rinsed the eggs 4 times with clean tank water. Imagine how dirty they were before I rinsed them!

I then added them (with remaining silt) to the German breeder ring.

This morning, I attempted to remove as many bad eggs as possible. Some bad eggs still remain with the good eggs, because they were adherent and I didn't have tools to separate them. Here's the bad eggs I removed:

Keep in mind that there were many bad eggs yesterday that I didn't bother to collect, so I left them in the parents' tank. There were also some good eggs inside the terra cotta potted plant which I couldn't recover. Those eggs also remain with the parents.

Cheers, Eric

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About half the good eggs have hatched as of this morning; I saw no fry yesterday, so apparently overnight was the time to start hatching. There are still many unhatched "healthy-looking" eggs, so I expect more fry.

This time, after all are hatched, my plan is to transfer them immediately to an unfiltered 5-gallon or 2 gallon tank with an airstone and heater. As I am with the last group, I'll do 50% daily or every-other-day water changes using a mix of parents' tank water and RO water. With this setup, food (live microworms) can sit on glass floor and there's no sponge for them to get stuck in or under.

Although my survival from the earlier group of babies was only 17, that's still way better than any spawn before. And, those babies seem to be growing much faster than my original four babies did in the hang-on breeder box. (maybe that's my imagination, but these 17 seem to be doing very well). In that group, I had left in the breeder ring for days before transfer to the 5-gallon tank, and in those few days before transfer I lost a lot of them (I presume for lack of food as worms fall through the floor of the breeder ring). So I'm hopeful for even better survival this time if I transfer before starting to feed them at all. Fingers crossed!

Cheers, Eric

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On Sept 21, I moved the "17" babies (I recounted and found it was 19!) to a separate tank and I moved the new hatchlings to the 5 gallon rearing tank. I'd already started losing babies even after 3 days in the breeder ring, but I think I have a good number of survivors still. I can't state what my survival rate is since I don't know how many eggs I started with, but I'd estimate that survival so far is about 50%, maybe better.

Also this weekend the first-hatched baby turned 6 months old this week. It's now 28 mm SL!

In November, James Robinson from Michigan will be speaking on doradids to the Sacramento Aquarium Society. I'll be bringing the six largest juveniles to the auction to go with his talk.

Cheers, Eric

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UPDATE on Amblydoras nauticus young: One video, all three age cohorts. FWIW, there are a lot more babies hiding in the leaf litter in that 5 gallon tank than are seen in the video.

You may recall that I removed the now-2-month-old fish a while back to get video. At the time I counted 17 fry after searching through the leaf litter. Then two weeks ago, before adding the new hatchlings to that tank, I meticulously culled through the tank to remove the 2-month old babies; I removed what I thought were the 17 juvies only to find that I caught 19! Great! So then I added the hatchlings to the now-empty 5 gallon tank. Two days later, while feeding the hatchlings, I saw a (relatively) giant commotion in the leaf litter, where I found another 2-month-old juvie still in the tank. I don't know if it had been feasting on the hatchlings, but it's a possibility. With that surprise find, I removed that juvie and added it to the container with the other 2-month-olds, so now I have 20 2-month-old juvies. As a precaution, I scoured through the 5 gallon tank's leaf litter (but gently so as not to harm the hatchlings) looking to see if I missed any more juvies, and I found none. Okay, all is good... Two days later, I get a repeat of the (relatively) giant commotion in the hatchlings' leaf litter and discover ANOTHER 2-month-old juvie hiding in there. Dang! (in a good way). Now I'm up to 21 juvies, 2-month-old (not counting the 4 5-month-old and 6-month-old juvies in another container). That's terrific! But how are they so good at sitting still while I'm sifting through the leaf litter that I can't find them!

Well, I hope I got them all now, because I still don't know if they were eating their younger hatchling siblings. That's in part because I don't know how many hatchlings I started with, and also because I don't know how many hatchlings I have remaining... Why? Of course, because they too are really good at sitting still in the leaf litter! I never see more than about a dozen swimming about at a time, but when I stir the leaf litter more come out.

Time will tell...

URL: https://youtu.be/DGm8wCz-qhk

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The oldest babies, 6 months old

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Another spawn today.

Cheers, Eric