[kermadum]

I'm way behind on this, I've merrily been watching my fish babies and having a blast, and then realised that there was a forum room with spawn logs so here's where I'm at (3 weeks later)...

I thought it would be interesting to see the combination of dragon and black, so put them in a small tank about 40cm x 20 x 20cm. 27 degrees. A bit of Java Moss. No Indian Almond leaf at the beginning (I didn't have any) but did add some about a week in.

10/11/2010 - Spawned
12/11/2010 - First photos taken (below)
13/11/2010 - started feeding vinegar eels & infusoria
16/11/2010 - switched to Microworms



The nest just prior to hatching



Father minding the brood



Just chilling out under the nest


There's a few current photos that I'll upload shortly.

[shadoh]

Can't wait to see how they'll turn out! Is the male dragon red?

[Sarah]

They are great photos! Happy to hear you got the photo links working for you. Are there pictures of the parents? I can see a bit of the male.

My fry I had were really light when that young.. pretty much transparent.
Yours look dark bodied. Lucky, you can see them better. I guess you do have dark parents - I had red/white BF.

[kermadum]

He has a bit of red through him, you can see him a little clearer here (he didn't smile for the camera though).




This is the mother, a little bit battered afterwards...




Thanks for your help Sarah. I worked it out... finally.

Still trying to upload the new photos I took today.

[kermadum]

Here's a couple of photos that I took yesterday of the babies (aged three weeks).

They look like they're starting to get ventrals and I've noticed that there is a difference in colouring between them ranging from quite dark to really light (all shades of greyish brown). I forgot to mention this is quite a big spawn. I tried counting this morning and got to 100 before I gave up. I think there could be anything up to double that amount.


A bunch hanging around the back.



A little guy.



The bottom dwellers.

[shadoh]

Wouldn't have thought you'd get light bodies from that pairing, then again, who knows what they were carrying. All my fry that were light bodied at this age turned out to be cambodian or pastel.

[Sarah]

Thanks for posting lots of pictures. Parents look lovely. The male.. I don't care about the red, I think it suits him and he would look funny without it. Though I don't know - I think he is smiling a little. Kinda like "I know I'm beautiful, but I'm modest".
I can't believe how clear your photos are! I really love the middle one of the fry, it is just amazing!

[kermadum]

A few more random observations at this point....

The difference in colouring between light and dark is getting much more pronounced (Hopefully when I do my next photo update in a few days I'll be able to capture that). There's still not a lot of "colour" (with the exception of one that I noticed a little bit of red on) just lightness and darkness, but given the mother was black and the father not overly colourful either, I think that's probably all normal. The light coloured ones are getting noticeably shiny, I'm guessing that would be from the Dragon parentage?

Definitely ventrals on them now.

Quite a lot of them hang out on the bottom. I'm wondering if that's because I feed them mostly microworms which sink and so they hang out down there waiting for the next lot. Not all of them hang out down there, there's plenty swimming around and hanging out in the Java Moss. Should I be worried about them hanging out on the bottom?

I turned the sponge filter up today, it's running at a reasonably strong rate now, the fry are all big enough to swim against any current it has created, but there is noticeable water movement now. Is that a bad thing?

Oh... I also found a dead baby today. But so far it's only the second one in just under 4 weeks, so I can't complain too much about that.

[Sarah]

Firstly - Yay for ventrals!

Do you have a control valve? You put it on the airline tubing, it controls how much air goes though - so how strongly the filter goes. I would suggest getting one if not. They are only like a dollar or less. I bought a pack with all kinds of valves: these ones I'm talking about, I think there was 5 or so, then a hole bunch of other ones. Then there was suction cups. It was $2.

I wouldn't be worried about them at the bottom. It is probably just the food. Maybe somebody else will come with a better answer.

Too bad about the baby. Two in 4wks is pretty good though.
Hope you can capture the lightys and the darkys in the photo update.

[kermadum]

There's a control valve on the filter. Up until now, I've had it fairly low, but I decided to turn it up a bit today. It's forcing the fish to be a bit more active, which in my head is a good thing, but what's in my head is not necessarily always true so I'm curious to know what anyone else has to say.

[Sarah]

That's good. In my opinion, I think it is fine, just as long they aren't in a whirlpool and are struggling for dear life. I'm sure you will never let that happen though. Just make sure they will be OK when sleeping. Maybe put some tall plants in the way so it is a bit softer for them, but still have it on how it is. At least, I think it is OK.

What about everyone else?

[kermadum]

A couple of days ago I finally got around to setting up a brine shrimp hatchery (everything was on microworms and vinegar eels prior to that) so these guys have started getting BBS as well. They're loving it. It's certainly much more fun watching them swim around chasing those than microworms. I'll be adding grindalworms to the diet next week, so that'll be another interesting addition.

They've grown a little this week but not a lot to report, I think they're fins are becoming more noticeably fin-like, and the varied body shapes are starting to show, some shorter and fat, some long and skinny.

The colouring is still the same (different shades of light and dark), though some of them are noticebably shinier now than they were. I've tried to get a photo to show the difference in colour, but the flash tends to wash it all out. The average size is probably about 1cm, some longer, some shorter. Ventrals are good and strong now.



This picture gives you a bit of an idea how many they're are. This is the open half of the tank, the other half is fairly think with java moss (which you can just see on the left). It gives you a bit of an idea how many babies there are, I counted about 60 in this photo & as you can imagine there are a lot hiding in the java moss to the left. You can kind of see the light vs dark if you look about the centre (maybe slightly left of centre) at the front there's one of the dark ones.




Here's one of the lighter ones picking at something in the java moss. You can kind of see the shiny a little on him in his anal fin.




Not a great photo, everyone's a bit out of focus, but you can see how shiny some of them are in this, especially on the left.

[Neffy]

fantastic photos ! its really awesome that the fry are already showing signs of shine on them

[Sarah]

Great photos! I can see little bits of shiny specks! Much cuteness!

Oh, I thought I'll tell you - in the first photo, I counted exactly 90 fry!!! I went into paint, and put a red spot on each one I counted, so I wouldn't count it twice. So I would say you have about 100+ fry!!!

[kermadum]

There's easily over 100 in the tank. It's not a tiny spawn. And they're a hungry lot. They've really started to respond to food and are beginning to swim up when they see something in the water. They've gotten really curious about the siphon too, which is making it more difficult to clean, when they were smaller they'd swim away, now they swim right up to it and stick they're noses in it.