PlanetCatfish.com

So here we are starting out 2021. 2020 is a year to forget for so many reasons. I am one of those folks who will almost certainly die if I get Covid. So I have basically been a hermit since early last March. I have stopped shipping fish, for the most part, and relied on my club, weekend events and word of mouth to sell fish born in my tanks. That pretty much stopped last year. The problem is my fish did not get the memo. Both groups or 236 and 173 have continued to spawn. I am almost at maximum capacity for grow space and, despite my best efforts to slow things. they keep on going.

My original group of breeding zebra plecs had pretty much stopped spawning. Due to the combination of losses and some new additions, the group is now about 17 fish, My best gue3s is only 6 or 7 of the original 13 is still part of the group. The rest are a couple of offspring and new fish purchased. The spawning activity over the past 3 years has been minimal since I concentrated more on other species. I know there have been a couple of infrequent spawns but life conspired against a high survival rate from those few spawns.

I have pretty much given up on this group being productive, especially since i was doing more to discourage than to encourage spawning. I had even stopped doing regular daily cave checks in this tank some time ago. I figured what I was now running was a retirement home for old zebras.

The universe regularly likes to remind us of exactly how unimportant we are to how things happen and it just did so today one more time. I have a cave with just about free swimming zebra fry in it. For some reason as I was about to do maint. and a wc on the tank, I decided to do a cave check for some reason. Of all the fish I might be glad to see spawn, these guys would be it. Some of them were spawning adults when I acquired them in early 2006. They have to be close to being 20 years old by now. I like to believe at east one of them was involved in this.

This unexpected surprise made my day.

I leave you all with a little musical ditty, Madeleine Peyroux - Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky (From Now On) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLpO4zfI_MI

Happy days. We all need a little "plus side" from time to time and this will give you a lot of joy I am sure.

Thanks for letting us know,


Jools

Pleasure to read and to know. Thank you much for sharing!

I can't say I share your taste in music but I find it classy and interesting to learn what's out there and what our peers like. Thank you.

Hi TTA,

Yes, thanks for sharing. The fact they can "still get it up" after 20 years is awesome. Good for them! (and you).

Cheers, Eric

That's awesome the zebras spawned.

Great to hear a bit of good news!

Despite a little success with other species recently, I still struggle to get any Loricariidae to spawn, let alone get any young to survive!

Maybe this is the year!

This story gets stranger. Last March, as part of an import deal, I included 25 zebras at 2 inches TL for myself. I figured I would keep 15 to try for a new spawning group and I would sell 10 to defray some of the costs of my 15. When they arrived I set them up in a 40 long with sand, wood and rock and a couple of small caves. Their job was to grow. So I pretty much ignored them since.

Despite a couple of folks wanting to buy the 10, I never sold them. I figured the bigger they got the more they would be worth. About 2 months back I added a few more caves. Most of these were not the ideal size for zebras, but they were what I had on hand.

This tank was being fed well and the wood came from other tanks. Pest snails or their eggs hitch hiked in with the wood. I will not put assassin snails into tanks where I hope to have spawning, even if it is down the road. Every week I use a small diameter hose to suck out 150 snails give or take. I then dump them into tanks with assassin snails which long ago wiped out the pest snails in their tank.

So I was sucking up snails today and behind a cave near a Poret foam cube was a bit of debris. I decided to suck it up too. As I was doing so what appeared to be a tiny fry zipped out and I thought got sucked up into the hose. I was not at all certain I had actually see a fry. But if you have ever siphoned a zebra fry, you know then do not often shoot out the other end of the hose. They stick somewhere along the way.

So I blew out the water into a bucket and when nothing came out I sucked up some water and blew it out in the opposite direction. Nothing came out and there was no fry in the bucket. To make sure I restarted the siphon hose and sucked out a couple of large snails that should have pushed any fry out of the hose, and nothing. I figured I had probably seen a big fragment of poop or a sliver of wood and mistook it for a zebra fry.

I went to work on the other half of the tank. I turned toward the other end to get something out of the bucket there and I glanced into the tank, This time I saw the fry. It shot out from under the wood and sat in the sand next to the foam cube. There was no doubt, it is a fry. It could not have been out of the cave more than a day maybe 2.

I have no clue in which cave this happened and thus no idea who either of the parents are. I did not expect to see fry this soon. I had flash-lighted the caves before i began work on the tank and the only thing I noticed was there was a fish in one cave that looked a bit smaller than expected. It was still only about 2 inches TL. I figure it must have been the runt of the group as the cave was too large for zebras to use for breeding, only for parking/hiding in. I figured for sure, after seeing that fish that I was still a bunch of months from seeing even a trapping.

The longer I am at this the less I think I really know. Within two weeks I had unexpected spawns from both tanks of zebras and I had no clue. I know I have spawns in both 173 tanks and in both 236 tanks. I know my super white 236 have begun caving. How could I miss the zebras?

Wow, that's really cool.