FW vs SW aquariums

Teardrop Angel = Centropyge tibicen
It's black with a white teardrop shaped splotch on the flank. Not much to look at as angels go.

Martin Moe has raised various batches of angels over the years. He even created a hybrid between the Queen & the Rock Beauty. These specimens were instantly recognizable as such a hybrid, too, and were verry cool. These certainly didn't starve, and only met their end because Skip ( Moe ) destroyed them deliberately.

The main problem with angels is that their larvae are extremely small and need even smaller food than the rotifers we can easily culture. The best way to raise most angels so far involves the use of a plankton net and regular trips to the beach. There are some freakishly small plankton critters which the larvae of many angels seem to enjoy, but these are not very well distributed. Hawaii is home to one of the very best, and angel raising is much easier there than in Florida. This will change someday when we figure out more food organisms and ways to grow them. Luckily some angel larvae are relatively large and raising them is much easier.
If you ask me, the obvious thing to do would be to search the area where the fish call home if you want to find their preferred food.

No happy endings for peppermint breeding? Where have you been looking? They're some of the easiest ones, and I believe one of the big farms offers them fairly regularly.
If you mean on the hobbyist level, then yeah, they can be a heartbreaker. LOTS of work is involved with very, very little room for error. Most people who stick with it get more successful at it, but then again, most folks don't keep at it, I guess.
On the other hand, it might surprise you to find that good old ordinary flake food is one of their favorite munchies. Yes, I mean the teeny tiny early-instar juveniles. They way they feed is to just hang around upside down and wait for something edible to happen along that they can grab. Flakes actually work well for this, and they can grab and hold on to them for extended periods, gnawing away at them. The trick is in the size, with each species preferring to grab a preferred size food bit at different stages of growth, so the sorting is what really gets you. Leftovers have to be avoided or removed quickly. The water changes are another problem, as the shrimps are very sensitive. The best trick for this is to have the rearing chamber be only a small part of a large system, which allows you to concentrate the food in one spot while also maintaining good water quality.

Camel shrimp- these guys will breed pretty much constantly in a tank, but you'll usually never notice. However, if your tank is a bit dirty and not filtered to within an inch of it's life like most marine tanks, then some larvae can often find enough food on their own to go through a few instars without any help. After that they are easily spotted and removed to a feeding tank or target fed in the main tank, which isn't really the simpler solution it seems. There's not a lot of interest in camels since they're not considered reef-safe. Using an archimedes screw pump instead of the more typical equipment, by the way, will greatly enhance your tank's ability to rear larvae of oodles of various species of all phyla. I really don't know why they aren't more popular these days now that breeding is becoming a major part of the hobby. Airlift driven systems work almost as well.

High-end shrimps like cleaners and scarlets- these are a lot trickier, and the details of raising them are not known to me. It is being done by at least one facility which is keeping a tight lid on the secrets, but those secrets will get out as they always eventually do.

Reef rubble probably does have more worms and such in it than main reef rock, and certainly if it sits around long enough.

Crabs? Give us another decade and I'm sure somebody will figure it out; there are some pretty amazing species out there that would be great sellers, and that could drive development in that area.

This has been an excellent thread, very informative.
Mysteryman, anyone having success with Centropyge argi? Those are my favorite angel. Hardy, pretty, easy to care for and best of all, they are a perfect fit for my native marine themed tanks.

Sort of.

C. argi is an easy angel to spawn, arguably the very easiest, and indeed one of the easier of all marine fishes to spawn in an aquarium.

On the other hand, they're dang near impossible to raise. The only way to do it involves keeping the fry for their first week & a half in a big tub of "pea soup" that you somehow keep from fouling and ruining everything. Good luck with that.
It HAS been done, but not really enough to even count and certainly not in any practical way. Big round tubs are good for keeping the larvae going for that time, but you can't SEE them, let alone easily collect them for growout in phase two.

The very similar Resplendent Angel, conversely, is trickier to spawn and MUCH easier to raise. Resplendents are offered for sale by at least one farm fairly often. They're not cheap yet, though. The trick to these is that there is a food organism at Ascension that the endemic resplendents will eat and that is easy enough to culture. Unfortunately, the Cherubs won't eat them, preferring much more difficult food.
( By the way, I should point out that there is a lot of deliberate disinformation out there in this industry. I got this info from a guy who should be reliable, but you never can tell. I do know that Resplendents are much easier to raise than Cherubs, and I'm reasonably sure that this is the reason why, but I haven't been able to confirm it. The reason I mention this is that this is the very type of thing that often gets spread around to lead competitors astray, so it's possibly a red herring. This is one of the bigger problems in the business that cuts down on total productivity. Unfortunately, it's also one of the things that keep it afloat at all; you can't make a profit offering the same old stuff that everyone else does, so you need some exclusive items, and if you get them you need to try to KEEP them exclusive. )

I think the secret to raising Cherubs will be in the form of a technological gizmo. Have you seen those in-the-tank brineshrimp hatcher things that are full of briny water one side and fresh on the other? You put the artemia cysts in the salty side, and the nauplii simply swim over to the freshwater side where they get flushed out into the tank, thereby providing the fish a constant influx of prey. I know it sounds crazy, but it really works. I don't know how, but it does.
Anyway, I think that something built along the same principle that lets this thing work will ultimately be the answer to a LOT of mariculture problems. If we can somehow concentrate a whole lot of food in one spot while at the same time allowing the free and constant exchange of water in that chamber, then we're golden. It's already doable, sort of, with weird kreisel type tanks, but these are impractical and very expensive. Once we find a cheap and easy way to do it the world will change a bit. Keeping flakefood for shrimp in one area is easy, but keeping microalgae and protists in one spot is anything BUT easy.

Somebody somewhere is bound to figure it out, though. The twin pursuits of money & knowledge tend to make things happen.

Edited by Mysteryman, 09 September 2008 - 01:09 PM.

What likely needs to be done as far as those angels go is to figure out which sp. of tiny plankton they need. Then work out a system to culture them.

Yeah, I have read a few threads on peppermint breeding on marine aquarist forums(their is one out there that specializes in breeding of marine inverts...that is where the Thor amboinensis report comes from). Usually a dissapointing story of losing alot along the way and then finally losing some at the time when they start looking like shrimp(I recall they spend a loong time floating around in the water).

Ok, then, what about mantis shrimp? Imagine the guy who manages to raise peacock mantids or one of the smaller colorful smashers in captivity.

Are any of the colorful marine flatworms kept in captivity successfully? I know most nudibranchs are epic fail.

Could the gradual switch(ing) from dynamite/cyanide caught fish to net caught fish explain more breeding success in the marine aquarium hobby? I'm sure FW people would have alot of trouble breeding wild angelfish if they were caught with dynamite or cyanide.


But raising SW organisms is harder, no question about that.
This is my one irk with marine organisms, so darn annoying. FW and land organisms are so much more convenient. But maybe annoying organisms can be more fun...

Edited by critterguy, 09 September 2008 - 01:33 PM.

Mantis Shrimps- probably raised once or twice in some lab somewhere, but I don't know of any ever commercially raised by anyone. They are gaining a lot of popularity lately, though, so maybe that'll change.
( I used to have a solid golden yellow one. :) )

Flatworms & nudibranchs- Most nudibranchs are "epic fail" as you mention, but a tiny few are easy. Luckily for us, the easiest just so happens to be the most useful, being the voracious algae-eater called the Lettuce Slug. Flatworms are usually all too easy to raise, and we spend our efforts to get rid of them instead lest they take over the tank. Well, to clarify, there are a few pest species that grow like crazy and ruin things. ( which leads to another nudibranch that's very useful, being an obligate predator of these ) On the other hand, there are many species that are large and showy if not breathtakingly gorgeous. Naturally, these are very hard to keep. They do fine and even breed IF you can provide them enough food, but like the nudibranchs they mimic, they tend to have extremely specialized diets that we can't supply indefinitely. Of course, with hundreds of species available, we have a good chance at getting lucky and finding one we can keep. As our culturing methods improve, I would guess that someday a whole lot of species currently considered completely impossible will become almost easy. Or not. We'll see.

Capture method improvements making breding easier?
Well, it certainly doesn't hurt, but but actually, by and large the answer is no. If you look at the list of species we breed, you'll notice that most of them are species that were never really affected by bad capture methods in the first place, coming mostly from Hawaii, Caribbean, Red Sea & Australia. Fish from the bad places are easier to breed these days, though, but I can't definitively say if its because of better capture or because of better breeding methods. It's possibly a bit of both.

Edited by Mysteryman, 11 September 2008 - 03:07 AM.

Interesting stuff!

Alot of this info seems tricky to find. The DIBS(Desirable Invert Breeding Society) forum is trying to act as a clearinghouse for this info and has a few cool breeding reports too. I recall their is a similar forum for fish.

Don't remember the species, but their is on nudibranch out there that feeds on Aiptasia so is possible to raise with effort.

Also, do you see the hobby switching over 100% to cultured live rock anytime soon?

Edited by critterguy, 11 September 2008 - 11:56 AM.