More joy?

After a thoroughly enjoyable weekend at V Festival in Chelmsford, I discovered that one of the mouthbrooders has released her fry. I estimate that there are about 20 of them, which is amazing given how small the parents are. A few died off, but the rest seem pretty strong. I should end up with around 50 once the other two females have released.

Better yet, it turns out the male Blackbelt wasn't totally off the mark. I have around 30 Blackbelt wrigglers now being heavily guarded by a very irate looking female. The fry are very big, which you'd expect from such large eggs. Hopefully they will get to the free-swimming stage okay and go for the ZM food.

The other bit of potentially exciting news is that I think my rams are about to spawn. The female definitely had a very distended spawning tube this morning.

Fingers crossed.

Baby Jewels

As expected, the Banguis have been busy over the last few days. They brought out their free swimming fry for the first time today. Can't wait to meet them!

Hopefully I can syphon them off into a small growout tank. Would be nice to raise more than two, which is all I managed form the last batch (though they are very cute!).

The problem with the last attempt was that I didn't have a fishroom ready, so I had to try and save some fry in a livebearer breeding trap, which turned out to be a useless fry tank. The nice thing about the Bangui is that the fry will eat microworms and ZM100 fry food from day 1.

Must resurrect my microworm cultures!