More Babies

[Guy W]

Hoping for our first hatch of Maroons tonight and our 3rd hatch of perculas tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Technically this would be our 2nd hatch of Maroons, but we accidently killed all the babies on day 4 or 5.

 

[mogurnda]

You guys are going to town! How big are the biggest percs now?

 

[Guy W]

Oh somehwere around 3/16 and 1/4 of an inch. The newer babies are all just getting their stripes and really small yet.

 

[Guy W]

Perculas and Maroons hatched over the weekend. Unfortanatly the Maroon hatch was pretty small. Only about 100 or so hatched. The new batch of perculas was pretty huge, several hundred.

Current count estimates put us at around probably 800 to 1000 baby perculas now. We just set up 5 new tanks on a sump for grow out this weekend. We have space for another 3 or 4 tanks for grow out on the stand, then we will have to build a 2nd level above that.

I certainly hope all this work becomes profitable enough to recoupe expenses and keep the operation running. Things have been working out pretty well.

 

[Guy W]

here are a few pictures

 

[mogurnda]

You make it sound so easy. How many hours per week do you think it takes to do it all?

By the way, even though you may be running out of tank space, a hydrometer isn't a great place to raise baby fish.

 

[Guy W]

Originally posted by mogurnda
You make it sound so easy. How many hours per week do you think it takes to do it all?

That one is hard for me to say. The setup is all at my fathers house, so he does a lot of the routine work. But if I were to guess I'd say probably an hour or so per day is spent between feeding and basic mantenance. When we have a hatch that takes a couple hours to scoop up all the babies. Water changes don't take much time at all, but siphoning out the crud on the bottom of the grow out tanks takes a few minutes.

I don't know, 10 or 15 hours a week probably. Maybe a little more, like when we setup this new grow out system, we built the stand, drilled tanks, made a filter, and plumbed it.

Originally posted by mogurnda
By the way, even though you may be running out of tank space, a hydrometer isn't a great place to raise baby fish.

Haha, na he loves living in a hydrometer, nice and roomy compared to the tank with all his brothers. It did make taking a picture easier. I'll have to make a small glass box for taking pictures one of these days.

So when are you going to try to raise some of your clownfish's babies? They are still spawning regularly right?

 

[mogurnda]

So when are you going to try to raise some of your clownfish's babies? They are still spawning regularly right?

Say another bunch of eyes looking at me when I fed the tank last night. I might give it a shot when the 90 is set up and I've stopped fretting about it. There are several people around here raising rotifers, so it would be a good time to do it.

 

[Guy W]

If you can find someone to give you a gallon or two of rotifers and a few liters of Algea, you'll be set. You only need to feed the rotifers to the babies for about 10 to 14 days. You start feeding newly hatched brine around day 5 or 6 and wean them off the rotifers over the next week. After about 3 weeks they'll eat finely crushed up dry food (we still feed baby brine at that point because we have so much). After 30 days it gets pretty easy.

For dry food, we just bought a few different comercial products, Flake food, freeze dried cyclopeeze, some pellets, and grind it all up with a pestal/mortar, and run it through a 500 micron siev (sp?). They eat that very well, and even some frozen food at this point.

 

[mogurnda]

I'll try it in the fall, I guess. It would be exceptionally cool to make it happen.