all we need is a plankton net. When spring comes ill take you to the skyway and go collecting. theres tons of stuff. eels, shrimp, seahorses, starfish, sanddollars, pipe fish, snails galore like cerith and nassarious, sea hares, cucumbers, crabs, pistol shrimp, mantis shrimp, gobies, blennies and tons more.

wow i never realised we had such diversity in the bay. i look forward to collecting i hope i find a mantis unless i find one in the rock i just got from tampa bay saltwater as ive wanted another since my last one died because of equipment failure

ill show you the secret grass flat i go to. ill make sure you go home with a bucket of cool stuff

sweet i cant wait. i went to fort desoto with my family one afternoon and on our way back we stopped off the road on the way back in some of the opening in the trees where there are small beaches you can walk around on and i collected a ton of hermits and a few nassarius. i kept the nassarius and most of the hermits in my aquapod and put a few hermits in my mantis tank for my mantis and then used the remaining hermits as snacks for the mantis over the next couple of weeks.

i would almost fly down to go with you guys. sounds like fun!

I'm sure I could eventually google this up, but what is it that triggers the spawning? The high water temp?

time, sexual maturity, diet, and excellent water quality.

another huge nest was laid. Just trying to locate small rotifers now

GL

Ditto!

this batch will hatch on sunday and rotifers wont come in until wednesday so ill have to skip this batch again.......pffffffttttt. Oh well. better luck next batch

it'll happen.........sometime.

im going to try and strain out some small rotifers from my current batch and try this batch of blennies. They will hatch tomorrow night

tonight is the 8th night and the blennies will hatch. As soon as the lights go off i kill all the pumps and wait for the male to fan the eggs so they can hatch. Then i manually collect them and into the larvae tank with rotifers and phyto.

in the tank now, lets see how they do. They have plenty of rotifers

Tagging along now. Just found this thread. Good luck. Get any to make it and want to sell one, let me know. Would want a small one. Mark

lights on at 9am, there are minimal dead actually only counted 5 and possibly 2000 alive, but i also notice that some have been eating which is a great thing. They have bigger bellies than most. That is a good sign. I will be implicating 4 water changes a day and multiple feedings of rotifers so that they can eat the small ones and have plenty of food. Each water change i will vacuum the bottom of the tank removing all the poop and sediment left from the blennies and the rotifers.

This is a great thread, tagging along to see how it works out. So far very well done.

good luck man, still following along!

Awesome, but we want pictures, pictures I say. As if you don't have enough to do without having a camera in your hand. Just keep us posted. Good luck, Mark

Man, I really envy you guys living in florida! Arrrrrrrrg. Warm weather, women in bikinis, foraging for cool aquarium stuff...

lemme see if i can snap some pics of these little buggers

here is a small portion of these guys. This is just one corner. They are stacked in every corner as well as in the water column.




and the biocube when they hatched. They were this thick all the way to the bottom of the tank

wow thats a ton of tiny little babies you have there. i hope they make it because id love to see them as they grow

also how do you catch all the little babies out of te biocube looks like it would be a PITA

You talked about cleaning the bottom, how do you not suck them up at the same time?

a small collection cup and a flashlight. The blennies are phototrophic and attracted to light so i shine a light at the top of the tank and scoop 18 times which is roughly 5 gallons. The remaining 100 or so left become food or filter cloggers


i have a tool that i made with bristles on it so the babies wont get sucked up. I also made one out of a toothbrush and rigid airline tubing. Going macgyver on their ass

did you think of a price when there ready to be sold?

they will be roughly 20-30 bucks

i just looked at the babies under a magnified glass and they all are eating well.

nice thats a good thing. how long till they morph into little fish

i have a tool that i made with bristles on it so the babies wont get sucked up. I also made one out of a toothbrush and rigid airline tubing. Going macgyver on their ass
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LOL...that is funny and very creative macgyver lol! Amazing...all those teeny tiny babies! Good luck, you are doing a great job!

Yippee!! I am so glad this set of babies is doing so well and eating.. Can't wait to see more pictures as they grow up.

Also GT.. how do you tell the difference between a female and male starry blenny? You said mine was female.. I was curious as to how you knew.

14 days i believe before metamorphosis, but there is no information on them so we will just have to observe and record data

the male has elongated anal spines and the females spines are all the same length

just took this pic....its awesome. You can see how long they are. I had to hold the magnifying glass in front of the camera lens and i adjusted the color so you can see more detail. The tiny little dots are rotifers.

cleaned the tank 3 times today and they still seem active. Actively feeding, and no signs of die off. I think i only collected 5 the whole day. Here is another positive note. These buggers are strong. I have a 1 gallon bucket to drip new saltwater into the tank. The bucket is about 2 feet above the fry tank and the drip line goes into the larvae tank. When the water line was above the tube 4 babies swam 2 feet up the dripline and were stalled at the ball valve. Thats incredible swimming upcurrent (kind of) and 2 drips per second is a pretty fast flow compared to them. Needless to say i opened the ball valve and they went back into the tank.

SOB!!! I had massive die off last night. I would say more than half of them. I dont understand. Maybe they ate all the small rotifers and couldnt eat the big ones who knows. PH was fine, no ammonia, plenty of rotifers but not enough to use up the dissolved oxygen. New water was constantly being dripped in. I wish these were as easy as the clownfish. I guess lets see how these do over the next few days. The longest i have gotten the babies to live is 7 days....

So sorry I have been watching your thread and I have to say that I am so impressed that you can get those babies to live that long to begin with! Amazing how you've adapted feeding and everything else to raise them. I am positive you will succeed!

Good luck, do remember though, in the wild, out of your like 2000, maybe 2 will live. Now I know alot of this is due to them being eaten and the such, but really, to end up with 5-10 really good ones, I would say you had success. Thats just my opinion, and maybe I don't know what I am talking about. Anyway, keep us informed, I know my wifes class at school is watching this thread also. Lets hope for some good ones. Let me know when you have one ready to ship. Mark

the odds are the same with clownfish in the wild, but i have just about 100% success rate on clownfish. If all else fails i will have my super small rotifers come in tomorrow and i will try next batch. I wont give up, i want to be the first one to offer these blennies to the industry and try to keep these fish in the wild

good luck!!!!! things are looking good though

added some moonlights to the system. I was thinking that maybe the blennies went to the bottom and ingested the poop/sediment and that could possibly have killed them. I dont know. With the moonlights the babies should remain close to the top of the tank and remain actively feeding since they are attracted to light

Did the moonlights help?

nope only a handful left.....

what sucks more is that my rotifer suppliers' supplier rotifers crashed. No small rotifers for me

Sorry to hear it... when it rains it pours.

i have not had any luck these passed 2 weeks

Bro if it was easy - everyone would be doing it. You'll get it. You seem to determined not to.

i wont give up

here is pregnant momma due to lay tuesday night