Seabass's Banggai Cardinalfish Nursery

[seabass]

3 hours ago, Tired said:

I almost wonder if he had a heart attack.

I was thinking something similar.  He was thin from not eating for almost a month, but looked and acted otherwise normal the day before.  Plus there have been no new additions for years (so a contagious illness or parasite is unlikely).

[seabass]

Here are the five juveniles:

The six babies are in the other nursery.

 

[debbeach13]

Love em

 

[seabass]

The juveniles are eating regular, thawed, frozen mysis, so they are pretty much trouble free.

 

I feed the babies decapsulated brine shrimp eggs, which in turn hatch into baby brine shrimp in the tank.  It sure beats using a brine shrimp hatchery.

 

Here's how I decapsulate the brine shrimp eggs:

• I put about 40ml of tap water in a glass.  The amount of water isn't that important.
• Then I stir some brine shrimp eggs into the water, and let them sit for an hour.
• After the hour, I add about 20ml of chlorine bleach.  Again, the amount of bleach isn't that important; but I shoot for about 50% of the amount of water I used.  I don't really measure any of this (eyeballing it is fine).
• Stir the eggs occasionally, until the eggs turn orange.  This takes roughly 5 minutes.  The time isn't as important as the color.
• Then I drain the eggs using a 53 micron plankton screen.  I rinse them with tap water, then pour some water with a little Seachem Prime over them, and then rinse them with tap water again.  Basically I'm just trying to get rid of the chlorine.
• Now I flip over the sieve and run a glass of RO water (could be saltwater, or even tank water) through the sieve to release the decapsulated eggs into another container.
• Then I just pour the eggs into the tank.

At first, you can't see the babies eating the eggs.  Eventually they seem to feed on them as a typical fish would.  I assume they are eating both the eggs and the baby shrimp at this point.  They also tend to start exploring more at this stage.

 

After a few more days like this, I start introducing some shaved (chopped) frozen mysis.  They basically ignore it at first, but I keep it up (feeding both the eggs and the shaved mysis) until I can see them eating the mysis.  Once they are all eating the shaved mysis, I stop feeding them the decapsulated eggs.  Eventually, as they get a little bigger, I stop shaving the mysis.  Not really that complicated.

[seabass]

Here are the 6 babies as of today:

 

And three of the five juveniles:

 

The survival rate is actually quite impressive.

[mcarroll]

5 hours ago, seabass said:

The survival rate is actually quite impressive.

I'll say!!

 

Totally awesome!

[seabass]

A bitter sweet day today.  I sold the 9 remaining juveniles this afternoon.  Here's one last look at them:

 

[mcarroll]

Congrat's!  Like seeing the kids off to college.

[Christopher Marks]

Farewell! The last generation. You did well @seabass!

 

Do you still have any others from earlier broods? I think I remember you keeping one particularly lucky one, but that might be a cute story I'm telling myself 😄 

[seabass]

Yes, I did keep one of the offspring.  I'm debating whether or not to introduce it to its aging mother; although I have no idea what sex it is.  It's certainly as large as its mother, so it shouldn't be bullied.  However, I wouldn't be intentionally trying to breed more, as I'm kind of done with raising cardinalfish babies (at least for now).