E.gilberti breeding problems

Hello,
I´m a breeder of several Elassoma species for years, so I will call myself an experienced breeder of Elassoma. But now I have a problem. I got some gilberti about two years ago. In the first year (with the wild caught parents) I hat a lot of fry and I raised about 300 gilbertis. But I never got any fry fom this F1. I don´t know why. Maybe gilberti needs a special "trigger" to start breeding? I´m stumped right now... All males and females look very good, even the females had eggs in them belly....Anyone can help me? Would be great! This picture showes one of the males.
Thanks,
Knut

Erica? Where are you..

Erica? Where are you..

Too bad Erica has no knowledge of this subject....come on Matt lol ~

Please try putting two pairs in a planted 10 gallon for a month and then removing them. You should get fry that way.

Hi Knut -- I've had them breeding for nearly 15 years, kept at room temperatures (65 to 80 F), with about 12 hrs light/dark cycle all year. So I don't think they need any special temp or light triggers. Water hardness doesn't seem to matter much either - my water is very soft, but Erica and other folks had good success in hard water too. Maybe you could try adding some new foods to their diet (live mosquito larvae are one of the best). Also try putting pairs or trios in small tanks (3 to 5 gallons). Is it possible they are breeding, but the eggs or fry are just not surviving?

EDIT: I just had another thought. Is there any possibility that your original breeders might have been different species (okefenokee and gilberti) and maybe the offspring you have now are hybrids?

Is it possible they are breeding, but the eggs or fry are just not surviving?

That's what I think is happening.
Elassoma love to eat their own young, especially if their diet is too heavy on only one food item.

Water hardness doesn't seem to matter much either - my water is very soft, but Erica and other folks had good success in hard water too.

For the record, both DH 17 and DH 0. And I agree that they spawn at all times they are well fed, with no spawning trigger involved.

I don't think the hybrid thing is a concern. In all likelihood an offspring resulting from elassoma okefenokee and elassoma gilberti would be fertile. They have the same chromosome number, egg hatching time, and mostly the same body layout. There's no reason to expect the offspring to be infertile. If the month in a 10 gallon tank doesn't work, we can talk about you getting some new gilberti males. (In a hybrid cross, the male offspring is usually the infertile of the two. Read up on savannah cats, hybrids of serval and domestic cats, for more info.) But there's no reason why a gilberti okefenokee hybrid would be infertile, unless preopercular pores are vital for reproduction.

With fish colored up like the picture you posted, they are most likely dancing. If the males look like that, the females probably have eggs, which means dancing is resulting in offspring. Try either putting two breeding pairs in a separate tank for a month and then pulling them out and raising the fry, or siphoning the ground every three days to a week and seeing if anything hatches in the siphon water.

No, I feed self caugh live food (like Cyclops, Daphnia, and mosquitolarvae) every day. I also feed self breed Protozoa to the larvae. I use rainwater (with a bit of tap water in it) for all my Elassoma to breed for years. I also breed several other Elassoma all the time. And I had never any problems with them. Right now I breed evergladei, zonatum and okees. I´m really a fish freak for over 25 years now (with more than 30 aquariums in two rooms), so I know how to breed. I tried everything, Water changes with fresh and cold water. Different pH. Different diet. Different aquariums and combinations! Nothing worked. But what sounds compelling to me is that the parents where maybe gilberti males and okee females... I got them as wild caught fish from the USA. From a comercial import!
Thx,
knut

Edited by manticora, 19 November 2013 - 12:43 PM.

There is no location in the wild where both are found. If a wild catcher caught some, they caught either gilberti or okefenokee, but not both. Just check out the range maps and tables in here: http://biology.unm.e...et al. 2009.pdf Can you find a location where a collector could scoop a net and get both species? Unless they collected from multiple river basins and combined the fish in a big holding tank before shipping to you, I don't know how you could have been shipped both gilberti and okefenokee. The odds of getting only gilberti males and only okefenokee females (or vice versa) are ridiculously low if you had anything more than one or two fish. And again, there's no biological reason why the offspring between gilberti and okefenokee would be infertile that I can think of. Read about serval-cat hybrids and wolf-dog hybrids. They have different gestation time periods, different number of chromosome, different number of teeth, and they're still fertile or, if the male's infertile, the females are, and the way the lifespan of this fish is, they would breed with the purebred males. There's no reason why okefenokee gilberti hybrids wouldn't be fertile. It's like the same fish, except a different range and different preopercular pores count. Same egg hatch time period, same egg size, same larval size, same internal organs, same everything except range and preopercular pores. They'd hybridize grandly. Occam's razor: The odds of you getting a vendor who collected from two different locations and then mixed the fish in the same tank, who sent you exactly one gender of one species and exactly one gender of another, and the odds of this species cross not being fertile even if that happened? I don't believe it. That's not why. It's too improbable.

Now on the other hand, consider that suddenly not getting fry with this fish is a well documented occurrence that has happened to several people.
Getting fry for a long time and then not getting any is not unusual with this fish. It happened to me, and the reason was that fry weren't surviving to adulthood. There are suddenly enough adults in the main tank to hunt down and devour all the fry, and you reach a population maximum. The solution is to separate the fry from their parents, 'cause they're getting eaten.

"I tried everything, Water changes with fresh and cold water. Different pH. Different diet. Different aquariums and combinations! Nothing worked."
I bet they did their spawning dance the whole time through all of that. This is a continually spawning fish. It dances away as long as it's well fed. I bet yours danced the whole time. But I also bet they still ate their fry.

• Have you tried putting two pairs into an empty tank for a month and pulling them out?
• Have you tried siphoning the bottom of your main tank and raising the siphon water in a fry tank?

Maybe not infertility, but what about reduced fecundity? This happens with Lepomis x Lepomis hybrids doesn't it? Might reduce the number of offspring to a point where few are produced, and the adults eat the few that are.

Also this poster is in Germany, it is hard telling how mixed up the stock is outside of the US.

There must be a place where the two species meet in the middle Suwanee River though I suppose it would just be dumb luck if that very area is where the fish came from.

Also this poster is in Germany, it is hard telling how mixed up the stock is outside of the US.

The parents were wild caught.

******There is no location in the wild where both are found. If a wild catcher caught some, they caught either gilberti or okefenokee, but not both. ******
If you look at the map in your reference pg.137 there are both species in the Suwannee River drainage so I don't find it that unlikely to catch both species when you are out collecting.

Wild caught in the US, held in tanks until the shipment was made, then distributed throughout LFS in Europe. Leaves a lot of room for error.

See table 5 for Suwannee okefenokee gilberti distribution. 194/202 are same species, 83/85 are same species, etc. Each portion of the river only has one kind. You'd have to go up and down the river to get both.

There is no imaginary wall in the river that precludes one from entering the other's range. They both have similar, if not identical, habitat requirements. What would keep them from crossing over into each other's territories? There is discussion in the description about the probability of there being intergrades at the point where they meet. This happens with several other similar species, Lepomis punctatus/miniatus for example.

I would like to know how the OP obtained the fish. It seems very unlikely that he received a box of fish from a collector. They were probably purchased from a fish store, and we all know how well they label their fish. I think a mix up on the other end is more likely, than the collection end, if it happened at all.

There is no imaginary wall in the river that precludes one from entering the other's range. They both have similar, if not identical, habitat requirements. What would keep them from crossing over into each other's territories? There is discussion in the description about the probability of there being intergrades at the point where they meet. This happens with several other similar species, Lepomis punctatus/miniatus for example.

Elassoma are not lepomis. They are extremely territorial fish that do not move very far. We had a guest speaker, Dr. Frank Marini, talk at our aquarium club last month. He described how banggai cardinal fish, which are mouthbrooding marine fish in an island chain of the pacific ocean, have extreme genetic diversity from one clump of sea urchins to another. These fish find an urchin patch and they stay there, for generations.

Elassoma are probably much the same way. The inhospitable saltwater open ocean between urchins is analogous to the open river in between clumps of plants. That's why one river can keep two distinct species of elassoma, while in shiners and lepomis that swim through the entire river, you see hybrids all up and down it. Look at Table 5. There are very distinct populations with few hybrids. A pair or two finds a plant clump, they breed up into a colony, and that's the population there. They aren't travelling fish. The fact that there are a few fish with mixed opercular pore number attests to the ease of hybridization between the species. When one okefenokee wanders into a gilberti plant clutch and the two species do find another, they mate, and you get mixed opercular pore offspring. But the majority of that plant clump stays the one species, and the number of random second species fish finding that plant clump is low. That's what Table 5 tells me.

Both species can coexist in the same river because they're not travellers; they find a nice plant clump and they breed there. There are probably hundreds of little microenvironments up and down the river, with Elassoma plentiful in certain regions (with plants) and completely not-present in open water. I don't know. I've never been wading in Florida. But I bet they'd have no problems hybridizing. There's no obvious reason for offspring not to be fertile.

Elassoma are not lepomis. They are extremely territorial fish that do not move very far. We had a guest speaker, Dr. Frank Marini, talk at our aquarium club last month. He described how banggai cardinal fish, which are mouthbrooding marine fish in an island chain of the pacific ocean, have extreme genetic diversity from one clump of sea urchins to another. These fish find an urchin patch and they stay there, for generations.

Elassoma are probably much the same way. The inhospitable saltwater open ocean between urchins is analogous to the open river in between clumps of plants. That's why one river can keep two distinct species of elassoma, while in shiners and lepomis that swim through the entire river, you see hybrids all up and down it. Look at Table 5. There are very distinct populations with few hybrids. A pair or two finds a plant clump, they breed up into a colony, and that's the population there. They aren't travelling fish. The fact that there are a few fish with mixed opercular pore number attests to the ease of hybridization between the species. When one okefenokee wanders into a gilberti plant clutch and the two species do find another, they mate, and you get mixed opercular pore offspring. But the majority of that plant clump stays the one species, and the number of random second species fish finding that plant clump is low. That's what Table 5 tells me.

Both species can coexist in the same river because they're not travellers; they find a nice plant clump and they breed there. There are probably hundreds of little microenvironments up and down the river, with Elassoma plentiful in certain regions (with plants) and completely not-present in open water. I don't know. I've never been wading in Florida. But I bet they'd have no problems hybridizing. There's no obvious reason for offspring not to be fertile.

I respectfully disagree. Elassoma are also not Pterapogon. If the Elassoma didn't travel, how did they get up and down the river in the first place, or all over the southeast for that matter. Cardinal fish do not have to deal with floods and drought either.

I respectfully disagree. Elassoma are also not Pterapogon. If the Elassoma didn't travel, how did they get up and down the river in the first place, or all over the southeast for that matter. Cardinal fish do not have to deal with floods and drought either.

*shrugs* I dunno. Like I said I've never swum in Florida. It's just one hypothesis that could explain the data.
If they didn't hybrizide at all I'd expect to see zero mixed ancestry fish. Table 4 shows some oddball opercular pore count fish that could be explained by mixed ancestry. But that certainly could be first generation-ers that are themselves infertile, I don't know. There's nothing I can think of that would stop hybrids from being fertile, unless opercular pores are really vital for fertile offspring.