PlanetCatfish.com

A question for you people about a non catfish.
in my smaller Madagascar tanks I have Bedotia geayi (B madagascariensis).

but the weirdest thing happens: I loose all my females!
it's happening so often that it's not coincidence anymore.

the females all die hours or at the most days after spawning
I'm not trying to spawn this fish, mind. but they mature, spawn and die. just like that.
they also stay stuck at 6-8cm at the most.

I buy them small, they eat anything, grow (some don't grow AT ALL but stay 4 cm!), color up (they all color up nicely), swim, plenty activity and once the females get gravid with eggs it's all over
they spawn and then drop to the substrate, breathe heavily for a few hours or a day or 2 at the most and die.
the males do just fine......

but they too stopped growing. none will pass the 7-8cm mark
there are no diseases in the tank, no infections visible, all fish eat, swim and grow. I've used an antibiotic without any result

could this be the result of 30 years of inbreeding from a too small genepool? I'm stumped.

No, to the best of my knowledge they are not supposed to die after spawning. Certainly the ones I had didn't.

One possibility is that you're buying fish which are latent carriers of fish tuberculosis: the stress of spawning will cause latent carrier females to develop the disease. But it sounds like your fish dies very soon after breeding?

One thing to try could be to separate the females from the males, to keep them from breeding, and fattening them up before putting them together. It is conceivable that the females are malnourished and too weak to deal with the strain. I'd say my females were, oh, about 5-6 cm, and the males perhaps 8-10 cm.

I tend to agree with Mike's diagnosis.
Bedotia seemed to me to be almost continuous spawners as opposed to the way egg scattering Tetras where a ripe female expels all her ripe eggs over a few hours.
Whatever is going on is only indirectly related to their spawning. It is not at all normal. Egg hanging Killiefish are more analogous to Bedotia in spawning varying mostly in the numbers of eggs produced daily and their females often do exactly what Mike described if they have Mycobacterial infection.