Breeding sun catfish

mortal · Post by **mortal** » 17 Aug 2006, 08:11

is there any way to breed sun catfish?

any ways to tell sex of the fish?

any help pls, i would love to breed mine.

MatsP · Post by **MatsP** » 17 Aug 2006, 09:15

They are probably not easy to breed naturally in an aquarium. Using google, I found one web-site that states "You're unlikely to sex the fish, and even if you could, you'll not be able to breed them." The site further explains that the Thai breed them using hormone treatments or other stimulation of the fish, which in my point of view is "cheating".

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Mats

mortal · Post by **mortal** » 18 Aug 2006, 00:13

how can you not breed the fish?

i dont understand why they wouldnt breed naturally, can you explain?

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 18 Aug 2006, 09:04

plenty fish have unknown spawning rituals and need changes in water, food and environment wich we still don't know.

say for example that a small catfish spawns upriver, but lives his life (most of it) downriver; and he's caught there as well.

howq do you know it spawns upriver? nobody catches them there (probably noone even looks there for them).
what's the water like upriver? the food? the 'decorations'? rocks/ fast water? slow? clear? turbid?

so there's plenty species wich we keep but wich aren't bred so far.

how DO they breed them in Asia then, because for example Horabagrus is imported as a juvenile, no adults*?
hormone enjections.

a ripe female (gravid with eggs) and a ripe male are injected with hormones and after a certain amount of time the eggs and sperm are squeezed out of the adult fish and mixed to fertilize.
the fertilized eggs and fishlarvae are kept in shallow clear water with lots of air; once the fry starts to feed those are moved to a fishtank or pond.
the adults do NOT survive this treatment as a rule (there are exceptions, but still).

but because Horabagrus is one of those species that lay hundreds of eggs (as most mediumsized Bagrids do), there's plenty of adult fish to go around; raise one litter to adulthood and you have hundreds of fish. each one of those can give another couple of hundred fry and so on.

*adults fit just 1-3 in a box, wich would make them quite expensive; juveniles can be crammed with 50 or so in a box, hence it's a fairly cheap species.

MatsP · Post by **MatsP** » 18 Aug 2006, 09:53

mortal wrote:how can you not breed the fish?

i dont understand why they wouldnt breed naturally, can you explain?

As Sidguppy explained: To breed a fish you need to give it the right environment. Naturally, they may be triggered by temperature, diet, water chemistry, some other species spawning (producing hormones or other trace chemicals in the water), the daylight time (i.e. the day changes from short to long or long to short), and most difficult is the migratory species that need to move from down river to a small stream - they may not spawn until they can feel air on their dorsal region... They may also only spawn in a very large group....

All fish can spawn naturally - but finding what causes the to spawn like that is sometimes hard (most of the fish we keep and spawn regularly will do so under almost ANY circumstances!). There are PLENTY of species that have never been spawned in captivity [without radical human intervention in terms of for example hormone injections].

I'm only reporting what I found in google - and although this was "found on the internet", it seemed right to me. I haven't even kept these fish (they grow too big for any of my tanks).

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Mats