I finally found something for which my old Whisper 5 filter is good (since it's a lousy filter): breeding synodontis multipunctatus. Let me explain: I have a tank that houses several yellow labs and a pair of syn. mulitpunctatuses. About 7 or 8 months ago, I was cleaning the Whisper and found a number of little wriggly things in the filter and impeller wells. These things were about the size of a pencil lead, maybe a bit larger. Upon closer inspection, I discovered they were multipunctatus fry that apparently had been sucked up by the filter intake and that had been living happily in the filter itself. I released them into a growout tank and all 9 survived.
Since then, I've twice removed this filter and found between 1 and 8 fry swimming around in there. I've since read that one of the ways people breed Syn. petricola and multipunctatus is by rigging up some sort of syphon to pull the fertilzed eggs and/or small fry out of the main tank area (so they aren't predated on). My Whisper seems to be doing just this; with the intake near the substrate, it must be sucking up the newly hatched fry and safely depositing them in the filter where they mature. (I've never seen any fry in the main tank.)
I think this is interesting and wanted to share. If you have a Whisper that you think is junk, it might be useful as a syno fry incubator. Now if I could just get the stupid filter to reliably start after power outages....
JIm
Since then, I've twice removed this filter and found between 1 and 8 fry swimming around in there. I've since read that one of the ways people breed Syn. petricola and multipunctatus is by rigging up some sort of syphon to pull the fertilzed eggs and/or small fry out of the main tank area (so they aren't predated on). My Whisper seems to be doing just this; with the intake near the substrate, it must be sucking up the newly hatched fry and safely depositing them in the filter where they mature. (I've never seen any fry in the main tank.)
I think this is interesting and wanted to share. If you have a Whisper that you think is junk, it might be useful as a syno fry incubator. Now if I could just get the stupid filter to reliably start after power outages....
JIm
