My Blackbanded Sunfish caught in the act...

Got to watch one of my male blackbanded sunfish spawn with the two larger females in the tank this evening. I was surprised at how much the color of the male changed durring the courship. I snapped quite a few pics but of course pictures never give what you see with your eye justice. When spawning other sunfish species I have seen females make drastic change but not so much in males. In this case the females did darken in color their black bands got even more black and distinct than normal. The male on the other hand went very pale, almost completely loosing the dark bands and becoming almost a uniform bronze color. The other interesting thing is they did not spawn on the gravel they spawned on the peice of driftwood covered in java ferns and moss. Ok enough of me talking here's the pictures...

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these are great pictures, you finally got pictures of them spawning...hooray. Are you going to harvest the eggs this time?

Wow, those are great pictures....thanks for sharing. How many times have these fish spawned for you?

I'm assuming they are the only fish in this tank? Yes, no?

This is the third time I have seen them spawn or at least noticed a nest/eggs but the first it was in veiw of the camera and not on the bottow of the tank. There is a small brindled madtom in the tank and 3 smaller blackbanded sunfish but the male is defending his nest well. I may try to pull out some of the eggs this time as there are more of them and they are easier to see than the last two times. Maybe I'll give a shot at starting some green water for them in a jar or something by my window. Oh ya these guys are in a 20 long and all but this end of the tank where they spawned is packed full of val and cryptocrenes(sp).

This is the third time I have seen them spawn or at least noticed a nest/eggs but the first it was in veiw of the camera and not on the bottow of the tank. There is a small brindled madtom in the tank and 3 smaller blackbanded sunfish but the male is defending his nest well. I may try to pull out some of the eggs this time as there are more of them and they are easier to see than the last two times. Maybe I'll give a shot at starting some green water for them in a jar or something by my window. Oh ya these guys are in a 20 long and all but this end of the tank where they spawned is packed full of val and cryptocrenes(sp).

Interesting. You would think the males would become more colorful like most sunfish do when breeding.

If you ever have any extra hatch that you don't need let me know. I'd love to have one or two. Here in Maryland they are extremly rare and I wouldn't take any for my tank even if I found some.

Awesome pics!

What's your substrate and filtration like Brian? I've got a 20 long that is about vacant, one golden and one starhead topminnow that I'm about to move, that has some good plant growth and sits in the window so its got a good natural light cycle. I've got a pair of bluespots and some more arriving today and I'd like to run something similar.

I have about a 3-4" thick substrate for plant growth. The bottom has some sphagnum moss (long fiber, green moss, decorative moss, got a bag of it at walmart for 3 or 4 bucks might have used 2 for the 20, I'm not sure it's been set up for 2-3 years like this), next there is a layer of sand (just play sand), and this is covered by about an inch of gravel mainly for looks. As far as filtration it just has a single air powered spunge filter in the back left corner. I use very little filtration in all of my heavily planted tanks, they all have just basic spunge filters. And I try to do a 25% water change every week or two but this does not always occur and does not seem to be a problem on these tanks but is needed on the non-planted ones. I feed them primarily frozen blood worms and a little freeze dried mysis and occasionally some live blackworms if I can find them at the lfs. I would think bluespots would spawn under the same conditions but the other 20 long right next to this one with 5 bluespots in it has not produced any results.

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Beautiful tank. I'm jealous of your husbandry abilities. Would you be willing to describe the lighting and light cycle?

Just a twin striplight, I think 24" bulbs 20 watts each so 40 total so that makes it 2 watts per gallon. As far as the light cycle they come on at 8am go off at noon, then come on again at 5pm and go off for the night at 11 for a total of 10 hours but the mid day period from noon to 5 there is light from the large sliding glass door window in the room so the fish think it's day for 15 hours. The reason I have two seperate light periods is someone once told me algae needs consistent long periods of light to grow and none of the tanks are in front of the window so they effectively only have 10 hours of direct light which is broken up in two different time periods. I'm not sure there is any truth to this (I still get algae), but it also fits nicely with when I am around the tanks.

well the eggs disapeard by yesterday morning a day after they spawned (i'm blaming the little brindled madtom in the tank) but they spawned again today so I got to use the stuff I got from the school. Took out 75 eggs with a pipet and put them in 5 clear dishes (15 per container) so I can watch them cloesly (not that this was probably needed but I was interested in watching them develope). I also started a greenwater culture in a 2.5 gallon tank. I have not done this before. I breed a lot of sunfish outdoors durring the summer but that is much simpler none of this cultureing food and such. The culture... I smashed up some banana peel, a few houseplant leaves, some val leaves from my tank, and seeded it with some water from a plankton culture at the school and tank water. There are a couple daphnia and copepods that I can see in there but I'm sure there are plenty of smaller organisms as well. I also put a light on top the tank that I intend to leave on. I think this will work but suggestions are certainly welcome. I'll keep updates comming as long as I don't kill all 75 eggs!

pic of the eggs, don't realy have a camera for this and I realized I should have put a penny or something in the pic as a reference, these are very small eggs, much much smaller than the longear eggs I get all the time in my other tank.

another update...

They hatched on day 3! I was surprised, seemed rather quickly, but approximately 48 hours (eggs were laid on thurday afternoon and hatched saterday afternoon) they hatched. Out of my 5 trays of 15 or 16 eggs these were the hatch rates... 14/15, 14/15, 14/15, 16/16, and 13/15. So 71 out of 76 eggs hatched. I took a couple more pics of the tiny larvae and this time put a penny in for scale.

I just wanted to add an update...

Everything seemed to be going well till they were about 9 or 10 days old at which time their yolk sacs seemed to be gone and very few of them took to my food offerings and quickly began to die off. I am happy to report that despite the big die off at 10 days I do have 5 that have taken to feeding on my culture of copepods and some vinegar eels. These 5 are now 22 days old and are growing and feeding well. Here are a couple pictures of them.

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Nice pics. That's unfortunate that so many died off but at least you got a few. Any idea what the fry eat in the wild?

I'm not sure but it must be something very small because these 22 day old fish are similar size to the 150 or so dollar sunfish fry that I had hatch yesterday.

I kept my fry in a soup of green water. This works awesome for Elassoma and most killifish. It didn't seem to work for the blackbandeds. One thing, I set this in the window sill and back in Feb it was killer cold out. I checked the water and it was only 62 degrees. So I moved it over to where I usually keep these tubs of fry in green water under a shop light on top of a row of tanks. Might have been too late. The few fry that were still in there were gone in a few days.

I got redbreasts going in a 20 long with green water, that were hatched about the same time, some are approaching an inch, but they start out huge. I have some western dollar fry in a 20 and did the same thing, they are smaller, but doing well. Like smbass said, the blackband fry are micro tiny. I just had the FL dollar fry swim off the nest this morning. That tank has croase gravel, and I was wondering if there was any fry. The thirty gallon had a reverse trio in it, and none of them were eating the young!

I decided to pull the adults and let the fry have the run of the tank, since I am leaving for a weeks vacation and the hungry adults might not be so kind after that many days without food. I just hope the green water keeps going for all these fry.

Still hoping that some of the fry in the blackbanded tank made it hiding out in the java moss, but I am not counting on it now. Never seen any after feeding baby brine, or during water changed which should have rousted some of them out into the open atleast briefly.

In the pond that I have had luck with them doing well, there are tiny, not sure what they are. I am going to guess a daphnia like thing that looks the size of dust. They are not paramecium, they actually swim with that jerking motion that daphnia do, not swirling around like parameciums do. These get pretty thick and certain times of the day near the surface and discolor the water. I am thinking that is what the fry eat, these things and the smaller fry eat whatever these things are young. Just a guess.

Great writeup Brian. Are the Black Banded hard to keep alive and as sensitive as people say. Very interesting writeup and photos, wished we would get more like this.

Thanks for sharing,
Daniel

They are touchy little fish, picky eaters and often die for no apparent reason. I've done very well with them this winter though, all 4 adults that came out of my outdoor pond at the end of the summer are still alive but only 3 of the 6 juveniles I kept for myself are still alive. The three young from last summer are contributing to the spawning activity and I've determined total I have 3 males and 4 females so if I can keep them going through the middle of may they will go back out and I should have quite a few young by the end of the summer. I had 30+ this past summer but sold all but the 6 mentioned above and the 4 original adults. So far the 5 tank spawned fry are still alive also and now look like tiny adults, so I guess they are no longer fry.

The egg size and nesting behavior of the Blackbanded Sunfish could be very valuable data. I am attaching a figure from a 1987 paper that looked at trade-offs associated with parental care in centrarchids. The pattern indicates that less investment by males (nest guarding) drives less female investment (egg size). What is really neat about this is that the Rockbass and Sacramento Perch are closely related, but the most divergent for these characteristics. It would be neat to see where the Blackbanded Sunfish falls out on this plot.