Clownfish breeding in tank
- Thread starter rockethippo
- Start date
On our false perc pair the survival rate was probably 60 to 75% of the babies making past the 14 day mark. After 2-3 weeks die off was basicly none. Getting them through the first couple weeks is hard but once they start getting color and actually looking like tiny little clowns they lived for us.
The Maroons on the other hand were much tougher. We would have maybe a 20 to 25% survival. Our male was a gold stripe and our female was a regular maroon, although I don't think that had anything to do with it. Who knows.
The False Percs would usually have about 500+ babies. It was hard to get an accurate count, I just now we had thousands of babies in a few short months.
We would wait until the night of the hatch, pretty much 10 days after laying the eggs if I remember correctly. We would turn off all the lights and hang a small mag flash light above the tank, and suck them up with a turkey baster when they swam towards the light.TomToro said:
We then transfered them over to a small Hexagon tank with all the sides covered in paper, to prevent light from coming in from the sides (they don't like that, and will swim into the glass and kill themselvse if you don't eliminate side light).
That's hard to say. All clowns are born asexual and become male. The biggest male becomes a female when there is an absence of a female in the population, and she will pair up with a mate. The easy answer is this happens at sexual maturity, not necessarily at 1.5 inches.rockethippo said:
The female will always be much larger than a male. I would recommend if you want to get a breeding pair to buy the largest and smallest clowns you can find and put them together. Maybe a 1.5" fish with a .75 to 1.0" fish. If they don't fight they will most likely pair up and spawn at some point. It did take our pair almost a year to start breeding.
Getting them to spawn and hatch eggs is the easy part, trust me. Growing all the stages of food, feeding the food, feeding the 3 day old babies, having enough room to grow out the babies, and maintaining the grow out systems are the challenge. It was an interesting project but we couldn't make any profit. 12 55 gallon tanks was not enough to grow out all the babies we had, and keep revolving the stock so we always had room for new batches.
If your interested in breeding clownfish I highly recommend:
Clownfishes (Paperback)
by Joyce D. Wilkerson (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Clownfishes-J...0821414?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179765398&sr=8-1
That is the only book we used, it explains everything you need to know.
Some pictures from our baby tank. These fish are probably around 2 weeks old, maybe a little less.
Awwwwww. What sort of filtration do you have in the tank with just hatched eggs? Just an air stone? How often do you change the water? How long beforehand do you start culturing the rotifers? To save money you could have just used large totes .
On the baby tank we just used a sponge filter, basicly:
http://www.drsfostersmith.com/Produ...ll&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Np=1&N=2004&Nty=1
Changed 30+% of the water every couple days or so. The rotifer and microalgea systems we started after the eggs were first starting to be laid, and didn't raise a batch until the food system was up and running.
Keeping the rotifers and nanochloropsys algea (spelling?) was pretty easy once we figured out a trick. Being in South Florida we just had large rubbermaid containers sitting outside in the hot sun with some air line/pump circulation. Keeping it indoors was more difficult and it never really took off until we moved it outside. It was kept out of direct rain.
Well I was thiking the rotifers would be easy to grow inside. I was thinking of just dripping kents phyto, or am I totally thinking wrong?
Also does a sponge filter just make micro bubbles? If yes, wouldn't a wooden air stone for skimmers work?
I'm not familiar with the kents phyto so I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if this is the exact product we used for the greenwater algea culture to feed the rotifers or not, but if this isn't it exactly it's very similar:
http://www.reed-mariculture.com/microalgae/nanno.asp
The problem we had, and why we moved the system outside, was the amount of light needed to keep the algea system growing. But once it's growing you don't have to buy any more products to keep feeding the rotifers, which is good if you intend on hatching a lot of batches of babies.
The sponge filter just collects a lot of particulate matter and offered a little circulation and oxygenation to the system, but not enough to create a current the babies had issues swiming in. Ultimately you probably don't need any filtration on the tank the babies are growing out in for the first several weeks if you do daily water changes, and on a small system that isn't a very big deal if you have your own RO/DI system to make good clean water.
clown fish babys
Just hatched my first set of eggs.. Only about 14 the first morning were alive and the second day only about 4... Have a 10 gal tank with sponge filter, lite sand on bottom and the bubble coral they were laid on.. plus the mom and dad... Fed them plankton and they seemed to eat it , but I must be doing something wrong.... HELP.....
Just hatched my first set of eggs.. Only about 14 the first morning were alive and the second day only about 4... Have a 10 gal tank with sponge filter, lite sand on bottom and the bubble coral they were laid on.. plus the mom and dad... Fed them plankton and they seemed to eat it , but I must be doing something wrong.... HELP.....
