PlanetCatfish.com

You can breath slowly now, I havn't succeeded yet however I intend making it my sole purpose in life for the next couple of months ( I have a few months off from slaving away for Lucifer ).
I have had a great success in breeding other SA fish and I believe it is the water in the locality which seems to be spot on for SA fishys.
I have set aside a tank specifically for this purpose and I want it to be a forum interactive/joint effort.

In my next post I will post pictures of the three inmates I have for this project so you guys can help sex them.
I definitely have at least one male and one female unless 2 males are gay

I have witnessed them mating before so I know that they are up for it.

What I want is suggestions from more experienced members that have bred woodcats/doradids before on how to go about it because I have tried doing nothing and that doesn't seem to work with these.

I would like it if we could all agree on a plan of action and I will follow these plans to the letter.

So guys any suggestions?

I have had a lone female oncinus become gravid & release eggs on two occasions. Once was when i forgot about her & left her in a tank where i altered the water to approx pH 8.7. A couple of months later i saw her swimming with difficulty, extremely gravid, pursued by a group of very interested S.Multipunctata, no doubt attracted by pheremones or something similar - perhaps high pH could be a contributory factor?

The only suggestion i might make would be to condition the breeding pair separately from each other as this has paid dividends with S.Granulosa & was what the breeder was going to do with his attempt at Oncinus - the outcome of which i am not aware of.

Richard B wrote: The only suggestion i might make would be to condition the breeding pair separately from each other as this has paid dividends with S.Granulosa & was what the breeder was going to do with his attempt at Oncinus - the outcome of which i am not aware of.

This had occurred to me so I'm glad you suggested it Richard.

Bit surprised you haven't had more response on this by now. I tried for several years to breed L Oncinus but without success, so good luck with your project. Sounds like you're pretty close as you've seen them mating already so I'm not sure what advice I can give.
One thing I didn't do, but thought about doing was to replicate a drought for say 3 months - lowering the water level, raising the temp, low/ no water movement, very small water changes if at all. And then replicating a flood - big water changes, higher turnover, lots of live food, etc. The key might be a particular food, apparently they are carnivores, but mine loved algae wafers.
I didn't do the drought thing because Its risky on the fish, but I still picture them lodged into their bogwood hiding places, hardly budging, water evaporating as it heats up in the sun, waiting for the flood season. The risk is - how far do you go with the drought thing?
My other view with these fish is - might they be 'group spawners?' I base that purely on the behaviour I see in similar cats such as humbug cats in shop tanks - massed together. Granted, they are juveniles and it may be nothing. I had a group of 6, including a rogue male that mortally wounded another and squabbled with all of them, I gave that fish away... I also had 2 females so ripe with eggs that at times they looked as if they had swallowed a golf ball, but no luck with breeding them.....

Thanks for your reply dude, I too am surprised at the lack of interest.
I have been pulling my hair out trying to get these to breed.
I like you plan as it is also something that I have been thinking about.
When I saw them mating once it was after I moved them from a shallow somewhat ignored tank which had got a bit bad to a new deeper freshly set up tank.
Almost instantly they were at it like catfish porn, "I have come to fix your bogwood." and they were away.
I have a 5ftx18"x24" tank that will be perfect for this type of plan, /i also have a small fluval filter and a FX whatever they are called the real big one which I can use when I move to flood season!
Awesome plan.

wrasse wrote:My other view with these fish is - might they be 'group spawners?' I base that purely on the behaviour I see in similar cats such as humbug cats in shop tanks - massed together.

The fact that they mass together in shop tanks is merely caused by their need to find shelter. If no shelter is provided, they'll try to find it amongst themselves*.
Just get rid of all hiding places in your tank and you'll find your catfishes in a corner of the tank, pushing others away in order to get the best, darkest spot. When I'm working on my tank, this worries me the most, because they might damage each other in the pushing.
Once the hiding places are put back, this behaviour is no longer seen - except in the beginning when hiding spots have to be (re-)claimed.

Also: having internal fertilization rules out group spawning imo.

The idea of a drought periode sounds very plausible; in fact I wish I dared to do so....but I don't

* of course this behaviour can also be seen in many shoaling fishes, but here the shoal remains more or less intact whereas in most catfishes this "shoaling" stops when hiding places are provided.

Marc van Arc wrote:
The idea of a drought periode sounds very plausible; in fact I wish I dared to do so....but I don't

Ha! but I do!

Any other ideas Marc old chum?

Have you got a possibility to obtain small live insects (like people feed their lizards or snakes)? That may well be very good food to get them into spawning mode.

I have indeed, I used to feed them to the Grokefish (R.I.P) I ended up with crickets all over the house-LMFAO!

This time I will seal the tank better and use an air pump or fans for air exchange across the top of the tank.

I am definitely interested in this and would like to tag along with my little group of L.oncinus

Wrasse you just mentioned what you did not do...can you fill us in on what you did try?

Birger

Its quite revealing, what triggered grokefish's jags to mate.

I didn't do anything out of the ordinary, which probably explains why they didn't breed!
I did all the usual stuff, by coincidence l also used a 60"x18"x24"high tank, with an old fluval external power filter and a smaller internal one. Big water change every few days. Plenty of bogwood and large terracotta pots which i angle-grinded so they sat 'upturned' at an angle to create caves. Mainly for aesthetics I used those silk-type plants usually sold for terrariums, draping them down into the tank like a river bank, it looked nice and helped subdue the light.
I thought conditioning the fish was the trick, I gave them a shrimp-mix (the usual raw prawn, cooked mussel,spinach, peas, garlic, all whizzed up and frozen) and broken-up algae wafers, occasionally pellet food. Because of their greedy appetites and the tank size, I rarely bothered with small food like bloodworm (probably wrong about that). I fed them small amounts every day, then every third day a big feed so they could gorge themselves. Occasionally missing a day completely.
Used RO mix water, PH6.5, very soft, 80deg.

I reckon to replicate a drought, the temp needs to rise, acidity needs to rise, minimal filtration and lower oxygenation, lower the water level, give less food. Thats all risky for the fish, you'd have to closely monitor their behaviour and a 3month period is only my suggestion, I'm not David Attenborough. A small box filter could be stuffed with nitrate remover, in the wild I guess that even during a drought there would be near zero nitrates (?), so would you still do water changes? Follow that with a flood season and maybe that would trigger mating and spawning.

Hey,

you may try wax worms as food. Bigger fish, reptiles and amphibians just love them. But they have high fat and sugar contents so not too much ;).

Regards.

for starters; no I haven't bred any Auchenipterids.

but on the other hand, there are some tricks you might try

waterparameters:
when the rains come and fish get into breeding mode, there are 3 significant changes in the water.
-it gets cooler
-it gets purer because with all that rainwater added the conductivity/hardiness etc drops like a stone
-the oxygenlevels go up. a lot.

and as an extra, you might truly simulate rain by adding the fresh water thru a garden watering can or one of those handy gardena showerheads to the hose.

so get out the ion-exchanger, turn down the heater, hook up a trickle filter, buy or dig up some peat and shower your fish.

food:
yes, insects. I've experimented a lot with this, because many fish do love insects. and since I got a load of tarantula's and breed my own roaches, there's ample material to fool around with.
certain big mouthed cichlid species for example look like piscivores, but that only happens when you starve em. their true aim is scooping up floating insects like the common trout does. examples: the Oscar (a true insectivore that's almost always fed the wrong food!), Paratilapia spp from Madagascar etc.
loads of surface feeding catfishes will behave the same......all those surface feeding auchenipterids are in my opinion the nightshift of what arowana's and oscars do during the day.
most food (especially small) that floats on the surface is insects. and we're talking Rainforest here: Insect Walhalla!
to avoid getting stuck with a house full of feral roaches and loose crickets: put the box in the fridge before feeding them.
that'll make em slow and sluggish. easier to handle.
if you want to be really sure: cool em in the fridge and then kill them before feeding.

certain insects can be "easier to handle" but aren't really that good or your fish. Mealworm/beetle (Tenebrio molitor), Waxworms (not a worm but a caterpillar), Morio beetle/worm (Zophobas morio) and Buffalo Worm/beetle (Alphitobius laevigatus) are all insects with a very high fat content.
even worse: they are fed what I call garbage. and when feeding your fish (or your cat, dog, yourself) you gotta think about the food pyramid.
don't feed yourself/cat/dog/fish with garbage.
it sure won't help breeding efforts.
also: fat fish don't breed.

remember: after 6 months of fasting the first thing that happens when the rains come is the Spawn.........repeat it to yorself: fish that spawn are fish that haven't eaten anything for months!

our 'pet catfish' are often simply too fat and too overfed to get into spawning mode.......this counts especially for those fish that originate in rainforests with a dry season.
not Riftlake catfish.
hence good insects are crickets, roaches, grasshoppers, aquatic insects and other chitinous inverts like gammarus (sold as turtlefood, worthless for turtles, great for fish!).

ALWAYS feed up your insects for some days before feeding em to your fish! old newspapers, printed ink, other dead crickets and dust don't make a good gutload......fresh fruit, lettuce, bread, flake food etc do.
a healthy cricket makes a good meal for your catfish!

next to that: experiment! when spawning time comes around, so does spawning time for other fish.
so there's pheromones. how to get these? dump in some water from the guppy tank to the catfish tank during the waterchanges. I kid you not; THIS is the method that worked when first breeding petricola and the polli white zambian Synodontis.
fish eggs. if you buy and eat fresh fish from the market and one of them turns out to be a gravid female cod or flounder: save that roe! it's good food. feed it tiny bits at a time, cause this too is 'fat food'.

pollen. yes, you read that right. get yourself some non toxic flowers, make em bloom and dust those pollen in your tank (!).
make the fish "think" that blooming season has arrived


and my final suggestion for some possible succes in breeding the Jaguar Cat? ALL OF THE ABOVE!
pull the plug, go for the entire enchilada ;)

Hey,

as always Sid has some great arguments. But what you are feeding your worms is up to you. When you want to gutload them you just feed something better than carbage - that's true for everything except waxworms.

They only fed on hive contents (I don't know the word for it but it is made out of wax - that's why they are called wax worms).

Imago bugs are moths and don't make that good food as larvaes (which as mentioned by Sid are caterpillars) since they are unable to feed and with every single day of their live they become less usefull as food. But just after transformation they are also great food. Waxworms should be used as candies but as I said before - almost every animal just love them and go nuts when they are fed. They are especially good for new arrivals which don't want to eat anything else since usually they are eating waxworms like pigs after first bite.

Here is a photo of my waxworms farm .



They are easy to keep once you have what they need to thrive ;). Well they get better in slightly higher temperatires like 30-35 C or even little bit higher.

Regards.

the bees knees, that set up

it's called honeycomb, in Dutch we say 'honingraat'.

in our hobby waxworms are useful; for a beekeeper they are vermin, only slightly less bad than Varroa mites or Colony Collapse Disorder

Wow Alex as usual your reply was awesome.
Nice one.
I especially agree with the part about woodcats being the nightshift surface feeders.
Anyone else got suggestions?