what is the hardest fry to raise?

im looking for a challenge. i have developed some methods that have yielded great results with raising E. gilberti, and i want to try it with another fish that is not terribly difficult to breed, but have super small fry, or fry that require conditions that are difficult to produce in an aquarium. i know of a few exotics that meet the criteria, but i would like to try some other natives as well. i believe that people have failed with the exotic fish by focusing too much on feeding them rather than creating an environment that produces the food the fry will eat. i havent actually fed my gilberti fry in almost a month. they are still growing quite fast and look healthy. i just monitor the tank to make sure it still has populations of food items. by the time these food items get wiped out, the fry will be big enough to accept other foods(actually, they are already big enough...)

what native fish has fry that are too small to be fed anything? i think elassoma fry are the smallest i have kept so far. i have about 40 juveniles from my last batch of fry. im actually starting to run out of room for them .

i like to have many projects going on at once. since none my current projects takes more than a few minutes of my time every other day or so, it leaves me with a lot of time chanting arabic phrases and vocab words to myself while sitting in front of my tanks asking those darned "what if" questions.

What about Leptolucania ommata the pygmy killifish.

I agree, Leptolucania ommata is notoriously difficult. We talked about breeding them here: http://forum.nanfa.o...lucania-ommata/
based on that discussion I decided to breed myself a solid white strain of guppies if I wanted a fish that looked like L. ommata, 'cause I figured I'd never be able to breed them properly. I actually took on spawning mandarin dragonettes (with no previous saltwater experience), seeing it as less difficult than spawning the lemon killi.

Also, sunfish. I wish it was popular to selectively breed colorful species like orangespotted, dollar, and longear sunfish like it's popular to breed cichlids.

Edited by EricaWieser, 05 January 2013 - 01:10 AM.

If you want a hard fish to raise, try empire gudgeons, Hypseleotris compressa! Their fry are less than 2mm. They have been raised by the Japanese. They are one of the holy grails in terms of freshwater fish. At least in terms of stuff found in Australia anyway.

Neat to see this type of work going on, sounds very interesting!

Cheers
Peter

AussiePeter, i cant believe you named the exotic that i will be attempting to breed and raise... lol

if i can find a way to raise their larvae in a tank, i should be able to raise anything.

ill try the L. ommatas. i have been going back in forth about buying them for a while now. thanks for the tip!
i know where to collect them in florida, but i probably wont be back there for a couple years...

im not really interested in selectively breeding fish for color. not yet anyway. i still plan on breeding E. gilberti for behavior but only because it seems so few people(if any) are doing it. i dont really care to follow the same methods everyone else does to produce results in an otherwise neglected fish. my interest lies mostly in doing new things to do stuff that nobody has done before.

to that end, i have found a way to produce a lot of little microbes while maintaining very good water quality. now all i need is the fry to try out.

Edited by Auban, 05 January 2013 - 04:50 AM.

erica, i just read the thread you posted. just how big are the fry of L. ommata? it seems from the thread that most of the trouble is trying to get them to spawn. i have been to that roadside ditch where the seller from aquabid catches them,(i have been to all the ditches leading into lake butler) and i can tell you it wouldnt be very hard to replicate those conditions in an aquarium.

Leptolucania ommata is easy to raise in low numbers, but if you're looking for dozens of healthy juveniles from a pair that's the hard part. I had a small colony in a 2.5 gallon tank that kept going for 6 years over I think 3 generations. There was always somewhere in the range of 4-10 adults. All it took was a warm, heavily planted environment.

Leptolucania ommata is easy to raise in low numbers, but if you're looking for dozens of healthy juveniles from a pair that's the hard part. I had a small colony in a 2.5 gallon tank that kept going for 6 years over I think 3 generations. There was always somewhere in the range of 4-10 adults. All it took was a warm, heavily planted environment.

hmm... that means that i could probably breed them with a simple partition to keep the adults out of the area where the fry would be. i have used that method in the past with a lot of success. its kind of like having a giant breeder box in the tank.

right now i just swipe a net in my main tank. every day i pull out three or four tiny bluefin killifish and rainwater killifish. i then move them to a tank full of hair algae with high flow and intense 24/7 lighting. i dont feed them, they eat what they can forage for in the algae. in about two weeks they are big enough to go back to the main tank without being eaten. it has tripled my numbers of fish in the last month. the bluefin killifish grow incredibly fast. knowing that L. ommata isnt terribly difficult to raise actually deters me from wanting to use them. if i manage any success with Hypseleotris compressa, im going to need all the tank space i can get, and if i choose a native, i want it to test the limits of my capabilities. i want something to test the system...

from what i can tell, empire gudgeon fry are infinitely more active than E. gilberti, or even bluefin killifish for that matter. being so small and so incredibly active, i think they need a LOT of food, but require even smaller foods than Elassoma fry. i also think that they are adapted to growing in flowing water, which means they probably require a much higher oxygen level than most of the fish i have raised. these combined requirements may be why they usually seem to die shortly after they absorb their yolks.

all this leads me to believe that my best shot at raising them will be in a tank with high flow and a lot of algae to serve as a place to produce the food items for them to eat as well as a means of keeping the water pure. i will also be able to supplement ciliates which i have managed to produce sustained cultures of.

so far as north american natives go, i can tell you that my methods seem to work pretty well with at least four species, E. gilberti, L. goodie, L. parva, and H. formosa. i had others, but i had to get rid of them when i moved to california. im pretty sure none of the others would have made the 3000 mile trip in the back of my SUV...

if my methods work, i will describe how i did it in fine detail so others can try. if i am successful, it would be great to see somebody replicate my results. that is just the sort of thing i would need to keep from thinking that i am just special

Edited by Auban, 05 January 2013 - 10:44 AM.

If you really want a challenge you can do saltwater fish breeding. Half my native fish species are saltwater, but I can't keep those because I don't keep anything I can't breed. And nobody knows how to breed the vast majority of saltwater fish. For example flying gurnards are downright awesome but I'm not setting up a tank for one without knowing it has the chance to spawn in it. Also I think I'd need a swimming pool. A lot of the saltwater species are huge.

Eels, too. Nobody breeds eels. Although I don't think you can. They live ridiculously long and it would take human lifespans to raise them. http://www.mnr.gov.o...ge/EELPAGE.html
One of the advantages to breeding guppies and Elassoma and the like is that their young grow up within half a year. We can see lots of generations before the end of our own lifespans.

Edited by EricaWieser, 05 January 2013 - 11:19 AM.

Oranged spotted sunfish Lepomis humilis and cherub anglefish Centropyge argi of the Carribean. Both are very easy to spawn but larvae are very difficult to rear.

i didnt know about the sunfish. whenever i get enough room, ill have to give them a shot. right now im sticking with smaller species. i would love to raise some sunfish, but im limited in space to one room, which is already mostly taken up by fish. ill look up those species.

i eventually plan on working with some saltwater fish, but for now im trying to find freshwater fish that produce similar small fry. in order for me to set up a salt water equivalent, ill need a few types of algae to work with. one of them will have to be fast growing and extremely fine, and grow strands that get several inches long. another will have to produce green water. since the former sounds like another of those algaes that people spend time getting rid of, i think i may have to go collecting in florida again to get some. im sure i can just order nannochloropsis for the green water.

for now, ill just stick with fresh and brackish. ill learn what i can and see what can be carried over to a salt setup.

Orange spotted sunfish are relatively small, generally less that 4". Their larvae are amoung the smallest produced by sunfish family (larvae similar to if not smaller than crappie) and may have requirements for rotifer sized zooplankton during first few days of feeding.

part of the reason i am leery about getting a sunfish is because, if i am successful, i am going to move on to another species. i could end up with a whole lot of fish that i will have to get rid of. one of the more rare and highly sought after exotics will probably be easier to dump online and into pet stores than just about any of our native fish. there are plenty of saltwater fish that would be easy to sell/ give away, but i am still working out the issues with that.

for the past couple years i have been looking into ways to raise stomatopod larvae in an aquarium. i looked all over the place in north carolina for squilla empusa, no luck. ill probably have to order one of the florida gulf natives...

i really think the key to raising the smallest of small carnivorous critters is going to be ciliates. i have noticed that the sessile types that plague my live food cultures quickly eat spirulina and chlorella powder. if scraped off of their medium and squirted into a container to shake them in, they all go free swimming. i have watched elassoma gilberti fry go after them, as well as very small Triops longicaudatus larvae. it shouldnt be too hard to gut load them with something nutritious and then send them into free swimming mode. whatever doesnt get eaten usually just settles down and attaches somwhere. at that point, they continue life as normal and go back to their filter feeding ways.

Edited by Auban, 06 January 2013 - 11:24 PM.

part of the reason i am leery about getting a sunfish is because, if i am successful, i am going to move on to another species. i could end up with a whole lot of fish that i will have to get rid of. one of the more rare and highly sought after exotics will probably be easier to dump online and into pet stores than just about any of our native fish.

If you are able to ship the fish nationally, I don't think you'll have a problem selling them at a profit. In fact, I think you have an advantage over other people because captive bred native fish can be sold in any season and there's definitely a winter lull for the wild captured ones. Also, native fish aren't found in pet stores, so you don't have to compete with chain store prices. And just because this fish is native to where you live doesn't mean it is in the entire US; you are offering a unique and beautiful fish species to people who would not be able to buy it in a store or from any of their friends. Native fish can be quite rare and profitable to breed.

There are a few things to remember when selling fish.
1. Giant high definition photo of fully colored fish. No blurry or super tiny images. No image-less auctions.
2. Free shipping (if you're nervous about this, just start the auction at what it costs you to ship).
3. Offer some extras, some stuff you have laying around. For example I offer grindal and micro worm starter cultures on everything I sell for no extra charge. It's as easy as putting a kibble and some worms on a wet sponge in a tupperware and adding that tupperware to the box with the fish. It adds a lot extra value to the auctions for the bidders.
4. Don't sell culls.
5. Add a few extra to the bag. That makes for good reviews from buyers. They're so pleased to open the box and find not 4 but 8 fish that often they are more likely to leave you a positive review.

This last bit of advice is sort of optional, but I like to explain the fish I'm selling in the auction. If I've spawned it, I describe how. I post pictures of both genders of fish and pictures of what the juveniles look like. I'll tell people what I feed it. What the pH and the water hardness are. What temperature I keep it at. Good tankmates and tankmates that don't work so well. This helps people who aren't familiar with the fish species (and native fish aren't something most aquarists are familiar with) become more comfortable with the fish and more likely to bid.
If in doubt, use the model that Lotsoffish employs. People pay more for his auctions than the same fish earn elsewhere.

*nods* Yes, you will have no trouble selling these native fish. Sunfish currently go for $3 to $4 per fish, shipping cost included separately. You do not have to be concerned at all about being able to find the fish you breed a new home.

Here's my 'how to ship fish' advice: http://forum.nanfa.o...pping-supplies/

Edited by EricaWieser, 06 January 2013 - 11:55 PM.

well, to be honest, i have no desire to make a profit off of native fish. exotics, well, ill sell them for a modest price, but im quite willing to GIVE my extra natives away.

like i said though, for the purpose of testing my setup, i will be moving along from species to species. i love my bluefin killis and my rainwater killies, so ill keep them in my 65g, but anything else i breed will have to go once i succeed in breeding them. i really just want to test my methods and refine them. for larger fish, ill probably wait until after i move to a more permanent home. im going to school now, but will be moving in about a year and a half. after i move, i probably wont move again for another five or more years. im confident that i can transport my smaller fish across the country after moving from north carolina to california, but i would be quite afraid of moving a sunfish in a half filled tank 3000+ miles. my next duty station will probably be that far away. if i were to get some today, im sure they would be fry or juveniles, they would be breeding the next year, right about the time i will be moving. smaller fish can usually be obtained at adult or near adult sizes, so i would have a better chance of getting a spawn before i move.

that said, i REALLY want to try breeding blackbanded sunfish eventually. i had some spawn for me once(accident really), but they were in a peaceful community tank and i did nothing to keep the fry from being eaten...

anyway, how long does it take to get a pair of orange spotted sunfish to go from fry to breeding age? i havent really looked much into them as i have always assumed that they need to be about a year old before they spawn. if i am wrong, please correct me.