Has anyone successfully raised Sunshine Chromis from fry?

[RSNJReef]

Awesome!

Just curious, how do you plan to handle the water changes?

I don't know if it is at all necessary, but my idea when we get marine eggs was to use an airline tube to syphon out with some fine foam on it to prevent sucking anything valuable up while also siphoning in at the same rate the fresh water to avoid changing the wayer too drastically wheb doing larger than a 10% change. Is this at all necessary?

Ok, so, to follow up, here’s a pic of the system I’m running, pretty simple but cost effective (all the materials cost me around $60). Basically the jar feeds the water to the fishbowls, and then the overflow feeds back to the jar, so whenever I want to do a water change, I just change the water in the jar.

 

[RSNJReef]

Ok, another quick update before bed. The first fry of the new batch of eggs hatched tonight at around 10 pm. The other eggs (the ones I collected anyway) looked fully formed so guessing more of them will hatch out tonight. Started the daily dosing of the sanolife mic-f tonight to prep the water for when they deplete their yolk sacs, and also added a little vitachem with b12 added to it. Will feed a little of each in the evenings, and see where it goes.

of the fry and eggs I collected, see below:

 

[RSNJReef]

OK just another quick update for this morning. No pictures this time but I was completely wrong on the eggs hatching out none of the eggs hatched yet but I did pull some of the eggs and look at them under the microscope and they are still viable alive and twitching so I’m expecting that they will hatch over the next 24 hours, I added a little more of the sanolife Mic-f and did my normal harvest of parvo but I will not begin feeding the nauplii until 24 hours after I see the next set of eggs hatch to try and keep the nauplii as small as possible. Will take a look again tonight to see if any of the eggs hatch.

 

[Court_Appointed_Hypeman]

OK just another quick update for this morning. No pictures this time but I was completely wrong on the eggs hatching out none of the eggs hatched yet but I did pull some of the eggs and look at them under the microscope and they are still viable alive and twitching so I’m expecting that they will hatch over the next 24 hours, I added a little more of the sanolife Mic-f and did my normal harvest of parvo but I will not begin feeding the nauplii until 24 hours after I see the next set of eggs hatch to try and keep the nauplii as small as possible. Will take a look again tonight to see if any of the eggs hatch.

What's the reason to keep the population of nauplii lower?

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

What's the reason to keep the population of nauplii lower?

I think they were meaning to keep each individual nauplii smaller (so that they're easier for the fish larvae to eat), not the population lower - but there is an optimal stocking density of prey-items for larval fish (with clownfish and rotifers, for example, the optimal stocking is roughly 10 rotifers per ml). For certain species if there are too many prey items, the larvae won't eat them - too few prey items, however, and most or all of the larvae will starve.

 

[RSNJReef]

Yes,

I think they were meaning to keep each individual nauplii smaller (so that they're easier for the fish larvae to eat), not the population lower - but there is an optimal stocking density of prey-items for larval fish (with clownfish and rotifers, for example, the optimal stocking is roughly 10 rotifers per ml). For certain species if there are too many prey items, the larvae won't eat them - too few prey items, however, and most or all of the larvae will starve.

Yes, ISFTS got it spot on. It was the size I was speaking to, but yeah, that’s a good point with the prey density as well. I’m going to need to watch that for this round, I will fully admit I wasn’t checking that before, and at least for the last round, I was probably at a prey density of 5-6/ml. Good points guys.

 

[RSNJReef]

Ok, so, another update guys. Seems like I changed way too much this time around for this egg batch (this time tried lowered salinity to 1.020, a hydrogen peroxide bath, and sanolife mic-f added to the water). I saw last night almost all the eggs were cloudy, and the couple which were still clear weren’t moving. Wanted to wait until this morning to see if anything changed but it looks like I lost this batch. The interesting thing I noticed though was with the addition of the sanolife, what I saw last night was the probiotic bacteria (which looked like little fast moving paramecium), we’re clustered over the eggs which were the cloudiest, and the clear ones they left alone. Wondering if that’s the probiotic ba Teri a trying to begin eating the dead matter, not really sure.

lesson learnt on this trial. I still believe there was benefit for the peroxide bath, so will possibly do a lower concentration for the peroxide washing the next round, use tank water again to match salinity but try to send it through a 10-15 micron sieve to remove any larger contaminants. It’ll be a couple of days I think before the next cluster of eggs, so will see once we get there.

 

[drawman]

I'm curious what's the purpose of the sanolife mic-f? It sounds like it's bacteria to help keep the water from fouling?

 

[RSNJReef]

I'm curious what's the purpose of the sanolife mic-f? It sounds like it's bacteria to help keep the water from fouling?

Hey drawman, the sanolife mic-f is a probiotic bacteria intended for fish aquaculture. It’s not something easy to come by for the regular consumer because inve (the company that makes it), only sells it wholesale and to retailers, fish farms, and aquaculture facilities, and the stuff is not cheap (around $100 for a 32oz container which has a shelf life of only a year), but it is pretty well-known to fish, breeders, and seahorse breeders especially (That’s how I found out about the stuff from when I first started keeping seahorses.). I get mine from artemia international, who sells it retail.

it’s primarily intended for fish gut health (it’s supposed help populate and support the gut flora of fish), but there have been a study or two that came out years ago showing that under the right conditions the probiotics in the mic-f would outcompete various pathogens (like uronema in fish) in getting to their food sources, thereby resulting in major die off of the pathogens in the fish water.

I use a little of it with each feeding for my fish and seahorses, have been for a couple of years, so figured might as well see if it helps these fry along. Based on what is saw though with the eggs there might be a chance that the probiotic might stress the fry if they cluster the fry to clean it off after hatching. Gonna try using it again though once the fry hatch to see what happens though.

 

[Court_Appointed_Hypeman]

Any updates?

 

[RSNJReef]

Hey Hyperman,

so, I need to apologize to everyone about all of the radio silence with this thread. What happened was a couple of weeks back I hit a heavy load with work and simply didn’t have the time for keeping up with the updates. On top of that, I still have yet to get any of the fry past 4 days post hatch, and posting pics of the very same thing over and over would just get boring for people.

From the very last batch that I had hatch out from the last time I posted, what I had found on the third into the fourth day was all the fry were dead , and there had been no more parvocalanus in the fish bowls. What I realized then was that feeding twice a day at 12 hour intervals while trying to keep a copepod density of around 3-5 per ml wasn’t cutting it, and with work plus my kids plus the other tanks I have, I simply wasn’t able to keep up with the feeding.

so what I did was put together an automatic dosing system for the copepods. I took a 32 ounce deli container and hooked it up to a peristaltic dosing pump, then put the dosing pump on a Wi-Fi timer I got from Home Depot. The opulent of the dosing pump then feeds into the jar with the source water for the fishbowls, so through the recirculating of the jar with the fish bowls, along with the dosing pump, I can now keep the copepod density within the fish bowls at around 3-5 individuals 24/7 (the dosing pump doses about 1-2 mls of the copepods every 2 hours, which seems to keep the fish bowl density constant).



once I got the dosing down, I then tried another batch and I was able to get 4 of the fish fry to day 4 again, and, I noticed with these 4 fry that it definitely seemed like they were eating (on the morning of the 4th day, the 4 fry were making very small dashes forward, the not like 5 mm at a time, as if they were just trying to eat the copepod that was right in front of their face). On the afternoon of the 4th day though, all of the fry were dead again.

I believe at this point that there’s something within their diet that they aren’t getting, and the parvo isn’t giving it to them. I’m planning to try a vitamin supplement along with infusoria on top of the parvocalanus for this next round, as I haven’t tried the infusoria up till yet. I harvested another batch of eggs last night, so going to try and see if I can get a better outcome with the infusoria. will post on whether or not this new tactic will work.

I’m still trying and have no plans to quit yet, or anytime soon, and will try to do better with the follow up. Sorry guys.

 

[Court_Appointed_Hypeman]

No that's great! Don't feel like you owe us anything, I was just excited to see how it was going.

I have a bunch of pumps left over from a diy doser project that is working great, I've been wondering if I could do it for live food and this confirms it for me, I might have a chance of raising fry then.

I completely understand the lack of time, and its awesome to see you are still going at it.

 

[RSNJReef]

No that's great! Don't feel like you owe us anything, I was just excited to see how it was going.

I have a bunch of pumps left over from a diy doser project that is working great, I've been wondering if I could do it for live food and this confirms it for me, I might have a chance of raising fry then.

I completely understand the lack of time, and its awesome to see you are still going at it.

Thanks Hyperman, and yeah I definitely say go for it, it’s definitely a bit of work, trying to raise fry in general, but the more of us that there are to try out these things the better it will be for all of us to learn from each other at least.

Yeah, what I did with the dosing pumps was I just took an old cheap one that I had bought off Amazon for like 15 bucks and I use the Wi-Fi controller from Home Depot because I liked the fact that with the Wi-Fi controller I can control the on off settings down to the minute. It also gives you the option to do a manual timed feed if I feel like I need to give an extra dosing outside of the regular time schedule. And it’s all programs through your phone. For 20 bucks it’s not bad at all.

Here’s a couple pics of my current set up. Pretty simple, but effective and all I do is clean out and recharge the deli container with new copepods every 12 hours.

 

[JasonVH]

Hi- new to the hobby myself, coming up to a year this summer. I've been following and rooting for you from the sidelines.

I plan on only having banggai cardinals. Comparatively, breeding those sould be a lot easier- no 'larval' stage, straight to little fry instead. Apparently there's a huge problem with them being fussy eaters though. The point of bringing that up is that your various attempts are giving me ideas to keep at back of my head in case my pair ever successfully hatches fry. The idea of auto dosing, for example. So your attempts despite the Day 4 'barrier' are encouraging others.

I'm very impressed by your attempts to study this and trying to figure out the particular issues and how to resolve them.

 

[RSNJReef]

Hi- new to the hobby myself, coming up to a year this summer. I've been following and rooting for you from the sidelines.

I plan on only having banggai cardinals. Comparatively, breeding those sould be a lot easier- no 'larval' stage, straight to little fry instead. Apparently there's a huge problem with them being fussy eaters though. The point of bringing that up is that your various attempts are giving me ideas to keep at back of my head in case my pair ever successfully hatches fry. The idea of auto dosing, for example. So your attempts despite the Day 4 'barrier' are encouraging others.

I'm very impressed by your attempts to study this and trying to figure out the particular issues and how to resolve them.

Hey Jason, thanks so much man that really means a lot. This is definitely a decent amount of work and I feel at a loss sometimes because sometimes I’m not sure what to try next, I’m gonna keep trying until I run out of ideas with this.

Just a quick note, because you mentioned bangai Cardinals, you might want to try either apocyclops, tisbe copepods, or newborn amphipods. I know of a local lfs that breeds cardinals, and they were having success with newborn amphipods being fed as first foods.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

A couple of random thoughts that may or may not be helpful as I stumbled across some more articles today:

What light conditions are your tanks (both the broodstock tank and the larval rearing tank) under?

What colors/wavelengths do you run for the tanks? (i.e. do you run just blues, full-spectrum, etc.?)

About how much PAR/LUX/how many Lumens?

 

[RSNJReef]

A couple of random thoughts that may or may not be helpful as I stumbled across some more articles today:

What light conditions are your tanks (both the broodstock tank and the larval rearing tank) under?

What colors/wavelengths do you run for the tanks? (i.e. do you run just blues, full-spectrum, etc.?)

About how much PAR/LUX/how many Lumens?

Hey ISFTS, sorry for the delay (work again taking up most of my time), so, I’m not sure about the linens, but, what I had been doing is I had a led desk light (yellow/white light) shining upward about 8-10 inches from the fish bowls. I had been keeping that on constantly over most of my trials because if had thought if I were to keep turning it on or off, I’d loose the fry to sudden death from fright. I’m thinking you might be right though, so what I’m gonna do this round is turn off the desk light and keep the room light on (it’s a much lower light intensity).

I also took a look at my infusoria culture today and it’s doing ok, not great, but what I found in there was some tiny rapidly moving crustacean (even my microscope was barely able to see it, I could only tell they were there due to the rapid movement. They have to be about 3-10 microns in size, and I can’t get a large enough view of them to identify what it is, but going to try and feed that to the tank this time around.

I also found out that the heater I was using wasn’t doing the job (a cheap 5w heater from petco). At best it was keeping the water at 72-73 degrees. So I bought a small 50w heater with a built in thermometer and set that to 77 degrees. So we’ll see how this one does. It seems to be keeping the temp pretty steady between 76.5 and 78, which I’m hoping is good enough.

just harvested another batch of eggs, and they actually hatched in my collection cup before I could transfer them to the fish bowls. There were easily about 50 of them already hatched in the cup before I could transfer them, so quickly got them into the fish bowls and added some of the infusoria. This time I’m going to try and feed mostly the infusoria and feed the parvocalanus very lightly (will try and keep it at 1 individual per 5ml, so the primary food for the first few days will be the infusoria). Will see how this round goes. If I can get past day 4, will let you guys know.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Hey ISFTS, sorry for the delay (work again taking up most of my time), so, I’m not sure about the linens, but, what I had been doing is I had a led desk light (yellow/white light) shining upward about 8-10 inches from the fish bowls. I had been keeping that on constantly over most of my trials because if had thought if I were to keep turning it on or off, I’d loose the fry to sudden death from fright. I’m thinking you might be right though, so what I’m gonna do this round is turn off the desk light and keep the room light on (it’s a much lower light intensity).

I also took a look at my infusoria culture today and it’s doing ok, not great, but what I found in there was some tiny rapidly moving crustacean (even my microscope was barely able to see it, I could only tell they were there due to the rapid movement. They have to be about 3-10 microns in size, and I can’t get a large enough view of them to identify what it is, but going to try and feed that to the tank this time around.

I also found out that the heater I was using wasn’t doing the job (a cheap 5w heater from petco). At best it was keeping the water at 72-73 degrees. So I bought a small 50w heater with a built in thermometer and set that to 77 degrees. So we’ll see how this one does. It seems to be keeping the temp pretty steady between 76.5 and 78, which I’m hoping is good enough.

just harvested another batch of eggs, and they actually hatched in my collection cup before I could transfer them to the fish bowls. There were easily about 50 of them already hatched in the cup before I could transfer them, so quickly got them into the fish bowls and added some of the infusoria. This time I’m going to try and feed mostly the infusoria and feed the parvocalanus very lightly (will try and keep it at 1 individual per 5ml, so the primary food for the first few days will be the infusoria). Will see how this round goes. If I can get past day 4, will let you guys know.

No problem - I don't know if the light type/spectrum/intensity would make a difference in this case or not, but I found these articles which made me interested:

Light-emitting diode spectral sensitivity relationship with reproductive parameters and ovarian maturation in yellowtail damselfish, Chrysiptera parasema

The present study investigated the effects of exposure to different light spectra and intensities on ovarian maturation in yellowtail damselfish, Chry…

www.sciencedirect.com

(Impact of different LED conditions on broodstock ovarian maturation.)

Influence of Different Light Intensities on Growth, Survival and Hatchling Success in the Mosquitofish <I>Gambusia affinis</I> | Journal of Ecophysiology and Occupational Health

indianjournalsonline.com

(Effects of different artificial light intensities on the growth and survival of [viviparous] mosquitofish from the embryonic stage on.)

I haven't gone looking too far down this rabbit hole yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to find if these variables had a major impact on most (if not all) fish and larvae.

Good luck with this batch - hope the infusoria works!

 

[RSNJReef]

No problem - I don't know if the light type/spectrum/intensity would make a difference in this case or not, but I found these articles which made me interested:

Light-emitting diode spectral sensitivity relationship with reproductive parameters and ovarian maturation in yellowtail damselfish, Chrysiptera parasema

The present study investigated the effects of exposure to different light spectra and intensities on ovarian maturation in yellowtail damselfish, Chry…

www.sciencedirect.com

(Impact of different LED conditions on broodstock ovarian maturation.)

Influence of Different Light Intensities on Growth, Survival and Hatchling Success in the Mosquitofish <I>Gambusia affinis</I> | Journal of Ecophysiology and Occupational Health

indianjournalsonline.com

(Effects of different artificial light intensities on the growth and survival of [viviparous] mosquitofish from the embryonic stage on.)

I haven't gone looking too far down this rabbit hole yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to find if these variables had a major impact on most (if not all) fish and larvae.

Good luck with this batch - hope the infusoria works!

Actually I think that makes a lot of sense with the light ISFTS. Newborn fry are attracted to light, and it seems through some of the clownfish breeding articles I’ve read there is a correlation between low light environments and surviva of the fry. I have a prime had I’m. Or using at the moment, and may put it over the fishbowls, but not ready to throw that one in there just yet (I might bite the bullet with this this weekend though and build a mount for it).

these are really good finds though man. I feel like you’re gonna take off like a rocket when you’re finally in the environment to be able to start breeding again.

 

[RSNJReef]

On a separate note, went to do a water change and clean my glass today on the tank, and this is how spiteful of a mistress breeding is: