Clownfish breeding build thread - first go at it

[Mr Cob]

I thought some more about it. What size is your little fry tank which they hatch in? I could probably come up with a black fiber "cage" exactly that size and hang it in my sump or tank. Then the fry would benefit from the extra filtration and still be in peaceful darkness. The problem would be collecting the eggs before they hatch and putting them in there without damaging them. My friend's clowns lay eggs fine in the display tank, they hatch but either get eaten or starve.

 

Maybe a turkey baster could spot-pick the eggs up gently. Otherwise you'd have to get the clowns to lay in a pot or on a removable rock in the DT somehow.

There's a lot of breeders that collect fry as they hatch from display tanks and broodstock systems. I prefer pulling the pot the night of the hatch, don't have time to sit around waiting for hatches...already have 4 human babies lol.

A few problems that I can see right off the bat with trying to rear fry in a display tank:

-too much light

-cannot use green water...perhaps would be too much pollution for display tank filtration

-may not be able to keep rotifer density up in such a small area (i use 5 gallon tanks that are half full...so around 2 gallons of water)

Not saying it wouldn't work, just giving you some things to think about.

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[Mr Cob]

Vid of the spawning this evening.

[ChaosFyre]

I thought some more about it. What size is your little fry tank which they hatch in? I could probably come up with a black fiber "cage" exactly that size and hang it in my sump or tank. Then the fry would benefit from the extra filtration and still be in peaceful darkness. The problem would be collecting the eggs before they hatch and putting them in there without damaging them. My friend's clowns lay eggs fine in the display tank, they hatch but either get eaten or starve.

Maybe a turkey baster could spot-pick the eggs up gently. Otherwise you'd have to get the clowns to lay in a pot or on a removable rock in the DT somehow.

There's a lot of breeders that collect fry as they hatch from display tanks and broodstock systems. I prefer pulling the pot the night of the hatch, don't have time to sit around waiting for hatches...already have 4 human babies lol.

A few problems that I can see right off the bat with trying to rear fry in a display tank:

-too much light

-cannot use green water...perhaps would be too much pollution for display tank filtration

-may not be able to keep rotifer density up in such a small area (i use 5 gallon tanks that are half full...so around 2 gallons of water)

Not saying it wouldn't work, just giving you some things to think about.

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The lighting wouldn't be a problem if they were in the sump. The green water is a good point though. A 2-5 gallon is easy enough, I have plenty of spare tanks lying around that are all small. But what kind of filtration would I need, if any? I assume sponge filter, but I don't know anything about those.

Thanks for the help

I saw my clowns dancing vigorously last night. They are starting to host a rock... but the other fish keep sticking their noses into the clowns' business and disturbing the dance. Especially the flame angel, who feels threatened by the orange clownfish. I've actually seen the orange snowflake do a twitch dance with the flame angel as they circle each other. No bites or pecking or chasing between them, just the flame being pushy/curious. It makes me anxious, but I was told that when the female reaches sexual maturity she will become more aggressive and territorial and also as she grows, she will become able to handle her own against the flame angel. In the mean time I'm keeping a close eye on her. The flame hasn't shown any aggression towards any other fish, and he was one of the first I put in there (but I chose him for his personality after observing his behavior while housed beside other dwarf angels, and he was even kept with a coral beauty before with no fighting).

[Mr Cob]

No filtration on fry tanks. Just tank, heater, airline. I use a product called Prime on day 3 and any time the in tank little ammonia warnings start to color up. I also do small fry tank water changes every other day while syphoning the bottoms out and on the non water change days I might add a little Prime.

Once they hit day 20 and after meta I move them to larger tanks and add a sponge filter and stop feeding live rotis and green water and switch to otohime. The green water and live rotis will foul the filter quickly.

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[ChaosFyre]

No filtration on fry tanks. Just tank, heater, airline. I use a product called Prime on day 3 and any time the in tank little ammonia warnings start to color up. I also do small fry tank water changes every other day while syphoning the bottoms out and on the non water change days I might add a little Prime.

Once they hit day 20 and after meta I move them to larger tanks and add a sponge filter and stop feeding live rotis and green water and switch to otohime. The green water and live rotis will foul the filter quickly.

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Wow this is beginning to look more and more plausible for me. I also have prime, and an air-stone and a spare heater, and the small tanks. How much is a small water change, and do you worry about the vacuum sucking up the fry? What size Otohime do you feed, where do you get it from and for how much?

At what point do you start feeding the next food and what is it (live mysis maybe?)? What were some tricks you learned after the first few hatchings that increased your fry count?

I'll have to look into getting a sponge filter. And then there's the rotifers... that's a whole other can of worms. Lol.

You know, I read once that someone had fed their rotifers an algae culture that they started, keeping algae water in five or ten 1 gallon jugs. Apparently the algae is easy to culture, just get some from a pond and inoculate the water. You may have to have air stones, I'd have to look it up again. I wonder if straight pond water would work if its green enough. I was thinking you could start a test rotifer colony with some home-grown algae, and it might save you some money not having to buy rotifer food if it works.

Edited June 3, 2013 by ChaosFyre

[Mr Cob]

my reply in red...

No filtration on fry tanks. Just tank, heater, airline. I use a product called Prime on day 3 and any time the in tank little ammonia warnings start to color up. I also do small fry tank water changes every other day while syphoning the bottoms out and on the non water change days I might add a little Prime.

Once they hit day 20 and after meta I move them to larger tanks and add a sponge filter and stop feeding live rotis and green water and switch to otohime. The green water and live rotis will foul the filter quickly.

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Wow this is beginning to look more and more plausible for me. I also have prime, and an air-stone and a spare heater, and the small tanks. How much is a small water change, and do you worry about the vacuum sucking up the fry? I change about 10-20% of the water pretty much daily and vacum with a thin piece of airline. When the fry are young it is very easy to suck them up because they like to hang out at the bottom. Just means I have to scoop them out and carefully put them back. What size Otohime do you feed, where do you get it from and for how much? I feed all sizes of otohime at each stage of their growout. Reed Maricultre.

At what point do you start feeding the next food and what is it (live mysis maybe?)? I start feeding Otohime after metamorphosis and around day 20. Once I wheen them off live rotifers I move them to new tanks with sponge filters. What were some tricks you learned after the first few hatchings that increased your fry count? YOU MUST HAVE A DENSE ROTIFER CULTURE. That has been the biggest issue with every clutch for me...keeping stable and dense rotifer cultures to feed fry. At the present time I pull up to 3 clutches post meta at a time. With 2 x 5g buckets of rotifer cultures going and feeding them 2.5ml of Rotigrow Plus (another Reed Mariculture product), I can barely keep up and just recently had to order more live rotifers (Reed Mariculture).

I'll have to look into getting a sponge filter. And then there's the rotifers... that's a whole other can of worms. Lol. Yes, Rotifers were the largest headache and variable for me... and continue to be a constant concern. We are thinking about adding a thrid bucket in addition to increasing the daily phyto dosage which equates to more $ and time.

You know, I read once that someone had fed their rotifers an algae culture that they started, keeping algae water in five or ten 1 gallon jugs. Apparently the algae is easy to culture, just get some from a pond and inoculate the water. You may have to have air stones, I'd have to look it up again. I wonder if straight pond water would work if its green enough. I was thinking you could start a test rotifer colony with some home-grown algae, and it might save you some money not having to buy rotifer food if it works. No clue on that, sounds interesting but not of an interest that I would care to try it. I'm all for saving some money but not if it would add more work to the daily chores. That would just add more variables to this whole thing. Honestly if my wife and I had to also worry about multiple phytoplankton cultures in addition to everything else, that would probably be a deal breaker for us. We are seriously operating at our limits. We enjoy it all and love rearing the little babies but it's a lot of non-stop work. We even had to cancel a vacation this summer for obvious reasons along with several simple weekend getaways. These little guys really do become part of your everyday life and sacrifices have to be made for them to stay happy, alive and thriving.

[Mr Cob]

Onyx Picasso fry at day 19... you can see stripes on some, they are about done with meta.

[Mr Cob]

a vid of the 19 day old onyx picasso clownfish babies They are so much fun to watch.

[Planeden]

that's awesome. a bunch of little dollar signs swimming around in there . glad to see all your work seems to be getting you good results.

[Mr Cob]

Updates on the onyx X onyx picasso pair 

-nest 6 was laid on 5/17 and is 13 days old and is in the middle of metamorphosis (last count was around 60 babies, only 1 has passed since starting meta)

-nest 7 was laid on 5/23 and is hatching right now : ) (has been a long evening, doing water changes, feeding babies, adding a second and third larvae tank, roti maintenance, pulling a pot etc)

Nest 8 was just laid and it is the largest one yet. Huge nest. 6/4

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[Mr Cob]

Pair #1 with Big Mama laying down nest #8 lastnight, huge nest with very large eggs. The eggs were noticeably larger than her other nests.

[Mr Cob]

big Mama keepin it real with a fat ol' nest... 1200-1500 eggs! Looks like I have brown hair algae or something.

Vid:

Couple pics:

[Mr Cob]

Got another mil of rotifers in today and all sizes of Otohime. With pulling 3 clutches regularly we are thinking we might need to explore something a little larger than buckets for rotifers. The 2 buckets aren't doing it. We may first just add another bucket but we really can't pull more than 3 clutches pre-meta at a time.

[ChaosFyre]

I really do admire your dedication. This looks like a lot of hard work, but rewarding. I really hope I can get to a stage that you are at, someday.

Since the culture is the hardest most time consuming step, in planning our rotifer culture, we had some ideas. We want to make an automated system. I'm not sure if yours is manual or not, so maybe you would be interested in making less work.

We thought to hook the culture up to our 90 gallon reef tank and have a small powerhead and pump (on timers) sit inside the culture. The powerhead would kick on a minute or so before the pump to stir the culture really well. Then the pump would kick on and begin pumping the culture into the reef tank. At the same time, (through a way I haven't really figured out yet) water from the reef tank would be pumped into the rotifer culture. The culture would be kind of like a miniature sump that only turns on once a day. Through tweaking how long the timer stays on for, we can adjust how much of a water change the culture gets (aiming for 33% water exchange every day). Then your coral and reef critters get fed, and rotifer culture gets harvested.

Alternatively, you could fit a sieve over the end of the tubing that carries water from the culture to the reef tank. The sieve would collect rotifers from the culture water as it enters the reef tank. You would then take the collected rotifers and drop them into an ice cube tray with a bit of water, and freeze them = make your own frozen food. Might be good for spot feeding or for training clown fry to eat frozen food or for training/feeding mandarin gobies...

These are just some ideas we came up with. I'm a complete novice at this, so please point out any glaring mistakes in my thought process lol.

[ChaosFyre]

Also, I'm really loving that onyx male. Its a picasso onyx, right? I thought about the best way to breed black snowflake clownfish. I wonder what a picasso/snowflake onyx clown crossed with a darwin clown would look like? I'd be really interested to see the offspring of a pair like that. The onyx has a lot of black on the body already, and it seems easier to obtain a snowflake/picasso onyx than a snowflake/picasso darwin. The only downside would be that the offspring would probably have orange faces, though maybe a second and third generation cross could remove that.

There is a black snowflake / darwin pair at aquadome... I asked about them, and they wanted $500. ;( I wonder about the lineage of that black snowflake-- there is not a whisper of orange on him.

Edited June 7, 2013 by ChaosFyre

[Planeden]

I really do admire your dedication. This looks like a lot of hard work, but rewarding. I really hope I can get to a stage that you are at, someday.

Since the culture is the hardest most time consuming step, in planning our rotifer culture, we had some ideas. We want to make an automated system. I'm not sure if yours is manual or not, so maybe you would be interested in making less work.

We thought to hook the culture up to our 90 gallon reef tank and have a small powerhead and pump (on timers) sit inside the culture. The powerhead would kick on a minute or so before the pump to stir the culture really well. Then the pump would kick on and begin pumping the culture into the reef tank. At the same time, (through a way I haven't really figured out yet) water from the reef tank would be pumped into the rotifer culture. The culture would be kind of like a miniature sump that only turns on once a day. Through tweaking how long the timer stays on for, we can adjust how much of a water change the culture gets (aiming for 33% water exchange every day). Then your coral and reef critters get fed, and rotifer culture gets harvested.

Alternatively, you could fit a sieve over the end of the tubing that carries water from the culture to the reef tank. The sieve would collect rotifers from the culture water as it enters the reef tank. You would then take the collected rotifers and drop them into an ice cube tray with a bit of water, and freeze them = make your own frozen food. Might be good for spot feeding or for training clown fry to eat frozen food or for training/feeding mandarin gobies...

These are just some ideas we came up with. I'm a complete novice at this, so please point out any glaring mistakes in my thought process lol.

Maybe think about a hob fuge/sump. If they ork like a hob filter you would just ave the one pump controlling the water in and out. I ave no idea about he rest of it, but I thought this might help.

[Mr Cob]

Another concern is that roti water is dirty and you would never add the roti water directly to a display tank or larvae tank. I will try and answer your other questions tomorrow. Appreciate your excitement and glad to see people getting something out of all of this documenting.

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[ChaosFyre]

Another concern is that roti water is dirty and you would never add the roti water directly to a display tank or larvae tank. I will try and answer your other questions tomorrow. Appreciate your excitement and glad to see people getting something out of all of this documenting.

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Okay, that's interesting. The only reason I mentioned adding it to the tank directly is because I read it was recommended here on "Culturing Rotifers" on the Reed Mariculture website. Let me see if I can find the article...

http://www.reedmariculture.com/support_rotifers_culturing.php

Here it says its okay to add it if you have a reef tank. I wouldn't add it to a larvae tank since the water quality is so important. But in a reef tank, probably you'd just end up having to do more frequent water changes on your DT instead of every day water changes on the rotifer culture. It would still be less work, I'd think.

If you still didn't want to do that, you could always have the rotifer culture harvest be dumped into a waste bucket trash can instead, and throw it out whenever it gets full. At least it would still be automatic.

Edited June 7, 2013 by ChaosFyre

[Mr Cob]

Well, we don't water change daily on our rotifer cultures. I used to but kept getting cultures crashing. Once I took the hands off approach recommended by another breeder on reef2reef, then our cultures stopped crashing. We water change maybe 10-20% once a week and top off once a week as well.

I would never add our roti water to our display tanks or larvae tanks. When I want to feed the tanks live rotis I add rotis and a tiny bit of rotigrow plus to keep them alive in the tank a little longer and to feed the filter feeders.

You have a lot of very interesting ideas that I think would be more finely polished by first doing what is known to work. Once you get the hang of how things work then you could start improving on the different areas of clownfish breeding and implement as you see fit. I bet you would come up with some very effective and creative ways of doing the daily the chores.

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[ChaosFyre]

Well, we don't water change daily on our rotifer cultures. I used to but kept getting cultures crashing. Once I took the hands off approach recommended by another breeder on reef2reef, then our cultures stopped crashing. We water change maybe 10-20% once a week and top off once a week as well.

I would never add our roti water to our display tanks or larvae tanks. When I want to feed the tanks live rotis I add rotis and a tiny bit of rotigrow plus to keep them alive in the tank a little longer and to feed the filter feeders.

You have a lot of very interesting ideas that I think would be more finely polished by first doing what is known to work. Once you get the hang of how things work then you could start improving on the different areas of clownfish breeding and implement as you see fit. I bet you would come up with some very effective and creative ways of doing the daily the chores.

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You're right of course. I'm definitely getting ahead of myself lol. That said... here is another idea I couldn't help sharing . I remember you said you fed your fry Nutramar Ova (right?).

Look at this study on cyclop-eeze. http://www.cyclop-eeze.com/cyclop-eeze_news.php

In particular, this:

Clownfish 3X More Colorful after 21 days of Feeding

The mean color index scores of Cyclop-eeze fed Clownfish were 2 times greater than control diets after 9 days and 3 times greater after 21 days of trial feeding. “Clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris) fed Cyclop-eeze diet (2,867 ppm Astaxanthin) had significantly higher color scores compared to control diet (500 ppm Astaxanthin).”

You Are What You Eat or How Did the Clownfish Get Brighter Stripes.

Dr. Sara Lindsay, School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine, May 2006

http://www2.umaine.edu/aquacultureforteachers/activities/clownfishExercise01.pdf

Apparently its not just the color that increases by more than 3x's, but also weight and length compared to some other diets (mostly flake). I asked a couple times about that pair of radioactive red clownfish at aquadome (I thought they were a strain of scarlet clowns), and they told me "Nope, its because we feed them Cyclop-eeze". Unfortunately, Ova vs. Cyclop-eeze does not figure in to the studies that I found. Cyclop-eeze's product home definitely has a more in-depth nutritional analysis than Nutramar's does. I'd be interested in seeing the nutritional breakdown of Ova, if its out there.

Cyclop-eeze's summary says it contains 50% protein, 35% lipids, 12% carbohydrates, along with a good list of carotenoids and HUFA's, and is 800 micrometers in diameter. The best I could get out of Nutramar's analysis of Ova is that it has minimum protein content of 31% and it "is highly concentrated with proteins and HUFA's", and is "1/16 in diameter (1587.5 micrometers). However, the general consensus is that fish prefer Nutramar Ova over Cyclop-eeze, though a mix of both are a great idea.

As a veteran clownfish breeder, I'm sure there's a reason you prefer Ova. My interest in Cyclop-eeze comes from the fact that I just purchased some from a friend in anticipation of getting a mandarin goby and I was curious just how nutritious it is. I thought to feed it to any of my future clownfish fry. Would you say good or bad idea, feed both, or no preference?

Thanks again, and I feel bad for consistently bugging you. If you're too busy, don't worry about a quick response!

Edited June 8, 2013 by ChaosFyre

[Mr Cob]

Thanks for the info. Another point or myth amongst clownfish breeders in regards to cyclop-eeze is that if broodstock are few too much in their diet that their eggs can be tough to hatch. This can contribute to 2-3 day hatch nights. We had this problem and cut back on it and fish hatch in 1-2 days now..the goal is same night hatches.

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[ChaosFyre]

Thanks for the info. Another point or myth amongst clownfish breeders in regards to cyclop-eeze is that if broodstock are few too much in their diet that their eggs can be tough to hatch. This can contribute to 2-3 day hatch nights. We had this problem and cut back on it and fish hatch in 1-2 days now..the goal is same night hatches.

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Wait, I'm not sure I understand. So feeding the parents too much cyclop-eeze can cause the hatchlings to hatch days apart? Is that because they laid more eggs or something? This is interesting.

[Mr Cob]

Thanks for the info. Another point or myth amongst clownfish breeders in regards to cyclop-eeze is that if broodstock are few too much in their diet that their eggs can be tough to hatch. This can contribute to 2-3 day hatch nights. We had this problem and cut back on it and fish hatch in 1-2 days now..the goal is same night hatches.

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Wait, I'm not sure I understand. So feeding the parents too much cyclop-eeze can cause the hatchlings to hatch days apart? Is that because they laid more eggs or something? This is interesting.

No, sorry, it was late when I replied and for some reason I confused cyclop-eeze with mysis. Mysis is the one that can cause the eggs to be hard to hatch. I think I confused them because mysis also increases coloration of clownfish. Mysis can bring out vibrant oranges. A lot of youtubers and vendors will feed lots of mysis before taking pics or vids of their fish which is why the orange can look so vibrant in some fish.

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[Mr Cob]

Pair number 2 just laid. Half onyx misbar x black ice snowflake.

Pretty big nest too. This is their first nest with me but they have been laying for years. I will probably pull this nest.

I shot some video that I will upload later.

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This nest from pair number 2 is hatching right now. Just pulled the pot.

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[Planeden]

good news. good luck dad.