Has anyone successfully raised Sunshine Chromis from fry?
- Thread starter RSNJReef
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OP
OP
Hey guys,
ok, so just to let everyone know. I’m still harvesting the eggs and trying to grow them out, and, still can’t get past the 3-4 day mark using the fishbowl Kreisel system with the parvo or the infusoria. To try something different I’m going to try and get my hands on some euplote ciliates to see if I can culture and try that as a food source, but can’t get any from my current systems. Seems all of my quarantining and medication treatments for coral and fish backfired in this case as my biodiversity is low. I siphoned out 5 gallons of saltwater from my 3 separate systems and couldn’t find any ciliates. going to try to see if I can get any from my copepod or amphipods cultures next.
With the fry I harvested from the sump of the living room tank, they are doing well and slowly growing. I put them into a 2 gallon specimen container with the Molly/guppy hybrid fry I collect from the sump of my frag tank (I usually get a couple of Molly/guppy fry a week from my basement frag tank sump). I’m not sure what the new fry are though. The only things in my living room tank that have both males and females are mollies (I have white and orange mollies in the living room, no black ones) and the sunshine chromis. The new fry look darker than the Molly/guppy fry, and the body shape is very slightly different, but that could also be trying to find a difference. Will have to see as they grow out. Here’s some pics for comparison of the Molly/guppy fry versus the new fry (blue arrows are the Molly/guppy fry, and red are the new unknown fry):
Now, two things I priced with the new fry.
One, I don’t know if, because the new fry had lived in my sump for a few weeks (what must have been a few weeks) and the turnover is pretty high, the new fry are exceptionally fast swimmers when motivated (they can easily get across the entire 12in length within a second), way faster than the Molly/guppy fry.
Two, the new fry are darker in color than the the the Molly/guppy fry. The pics don’t do it a lot of justice, but I can tell which are the new ones just based on their color.
Also, all of the fish (new and old) are foragers, and seem happy sifting through the stuff at the bottom of the container. Based on this, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to swap out the fish bowls for a rectangular container with an air bubbler at one end only to try and keep the water slower moving, and also put a black lid over. Will try and plumb everything up tonight and take some pics. There’s a new batch of eggs got laid yesterday afternoon , so will collect those tonight and transfer to the new container tonight.
Also, speaking of the parents, I noticed a change in the breeding behavior of the parents. So, up until a week ago, I would usually be able to tell when the parents were ready to breed or the male is tending to eggs based on their movement in the tank, but, their coloration never changed, it always remained a dark navy blue all over their body except for their undersides which was always silver. With the last courtship display though, what I’m seeing now though is when the males are trying to lure the female to their side of the tank to lay eggs, the males are now showing white/smoky looking bands across the top and bottom third of their bodies (so they have a white/smoky/translucent band at top, then the middle of their body is navy blue, then the bottom is the same white/smoky/translucent band). The males are very pretty to watch, and they keep this color as they are trying to lure the female over, as well as when laying the eggs, but, about 5-10 minutes after laying the eggs, the male goes back to its normal navy blue / silver coloration. Guess. It’s the brood stock maturing.
ok, so just to let everyone know. I’m still harvesting the eggs and trying to grow them out, and, still can’t get past the 3-4 day mark using the fishbowl Kreisel system with the parvo or the infusoria. To try something different I’m going to try and get my hands on some euplote ciliates to see if I can culture and try that as a food source, but can’t get any from my current systems. Seems all of my quarantining and medication treatments for coral and fish backfired in this case as my biodiversity is low. I siphoned out 5 gallons of saltwater from my 3 separate systems and couldn’t find any ciliates. going to try to see if I can get any from my copepod or amphipods cultures next.
With the fry I harvested from the sump of the living room tank, they are doing well and slowly growing. I put them into a 2 gallon specimen container with the Molly/guppy hybrid fry I collect from the sump of my frag tank (I usually get a couple of Molly/guppy fry a week from my basement frag tank sump). I’m not sure what the new fry are though. The only things in my living room tank that have both males and females are mollies (I have white and orange mollies in the living room, no black ones) and the sunshine chromis. The new fry look darker than the Molly/guppy fry, and the body shape is very slightly different, but that could also be trying to find a difference. Will have to see as they grow out. Here’s some pics for comparison of the Molly/guppy fry versus the new fry (blue arrows are the Molly/guppy fry, and red are the new unknown fry):
Now, two things I priced with the new fry.
One, I don’t know if, because the new fry had lived in my sump for a few weeks (what must have been a few weeks) and the turnover is pretty high, the new fry are exceptionally fast swimmers when motivated (they can easily get across the entire 12in length within a second), way faster than the Molly/guppy fry.
Two, the new fry are darker in color than the the the Molly/guppy fry. The pics don’t do it a lot of justice, but I can tell which are the new ones just based on their color.
Also, all of the fish (new and old) are foragers, and seem happy sifting through the stuff at the bottom of the container. Based on this, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to swap out the fish bowls for a rectangular container with an air bubbler at one end only to try and keep the water slower moving, and also put a black lid over. Will try and plumb everything up tonight and take some pics. There’s a new batch of eggs got laid yesterday afternoon , so will collect those tonight and transfer to the new container tonight.
Also, speaking of the parents, I noticed a change in the breeding behavior of the parents. So, up until a week ago, I would usually be able to tell when the parents were ready to breed or the male is tending to eggs based on their movement in the tank, but, their coloration never changed, it always remained a dark navy blue all over their body except for their undersides which was always silver. With the last courtship display though, what I’m seeing now though is when the males are trying to lure the female to their side of the tank to lay eggs, the males are now showing white/smoky looking bands across the top and bottom third of their bodies (so they have a white/smoky/translucent band at top, then the middle of their body is navy blue, then the bottom is the same white/smoky/translucent band). The males are very pretty to watch, and they keep this color as they are trying to lure the female over, as well as when laying the eggs, but, about 5-10 minutes after laying the eggs, the male goes back to its normal navy blue / silver coloration. Guess. It’s the brood stock maturing.
OP
OP
Ok, so I got the new fry rearing container set up. What I did was take a 10”x4”x5” specimen container and plumbed in an overflow, glued in rigid airline tubing into the two back corners, and drilled in holes for the soft airline tubing for the return line and the live food feeding line (from the dosing system). Also wrapped all 4 sides in electrical tape to make the side walls opaque, and put fine mesh sponge on the inlet of the overflow. Set up the system last night, put the new eggs in, and also ground up some pellet food and a little bit of nori and put a little bit of it into the container (trying it out to see if it helps with raising the bacterial load, maybe the fry may take to digesting the bacteria or even the soaked powder). Will see how this one goes.
I'm assuming no luck still, but any updates?
OP
OP
Hey ISFTS, sorry about the radio silence, and have still been trying with a new clutch of eggs each week, but no luck yet.
after the square container with relatively low aeration (1 bubble per sec) and a heater set to 78F failed at day 4 again (I did a couple of trials with this with both parvo and the same infusoria) , I tried something different and found some interesting results.
I collected a batch of eggs and around a half gallon of water. I divided the eggs into 2 32 ounce clear deli containers and left them under 24 hour ambient room light with no aeration, just eggs and tank water strainer through a 37 micron mesh.
On day one of hatch, the fry are very active for the first half hour, swimming all over the place, but after a half hour then slow down and just start drifting in the water column, floating around still like they are dead but floating mid level in the container and slowly drifting in the stagnant water. I would feed about 5-6ml of parvo nauplii (which would be about 200-300 or so) 3 times a day, while checking to see the density of the copepods before each feeding. The density of the copepods never dropped to 0, and the lowest seemed like 1 individual per 20-30ml. Using this method I was able to get the fry to day 5 with around 70% die off on day 5 and 100% die off on day 6.
what I noticed with the fry though is they seemed to like to just float mid level in the water, completely still, and with the still water, the parvo nauplii also floated in the stagnant water, but barely moved. Whenever a parvo nauplii finally moved, one of the fry would then seem to slowly move about 5mm or so to try and catch the nauplii. But again, because the nauplii wasn’t moving much, the fry didn’t move much either. It looks like the fry from early on are like ambush hunters, staying very still until something moves and then they strike.
So the conundrum now is it seems like I need stagnant water but a prey food which is around 10 to 50 micron in size but either moves like baby brine shrimp or a rotifer. I’m trying to see if I can find a prey item which meets this criteria, but what I’m going to try next is green water with live tetraselmis phyto as that’s a very active phyto. Will see what happens with that.
OP
OP
Ok, so, another quick update. Based on what I saw before with the fry seeming to like the stagnant water, I’m trying something different now with setting up two deli containers in a water bath, the container on the left will have more turbulent flow, with a bubble rate of 2-3 bubbles a second, and the one on the right will have a bubble rate of one bubble every second or two. We’ll see which group survives longer. I also clouded the water with a mix of isochrysis and tetraselmis phyto (live phyto from my own cultures). The eggs just hatched today, and if I get past the 6 day mark, will let you guys know.
OP
OP
Ok, so, quick update. With no live copepod or other live food in the water (with only isochrysis and tetraselmis in the water), the fry died after 24 hours post hatch in the container with 2bibbles per second, and they died after 49 hours in the container with 1 bubble every 2 seconds. S it looks like without the live food food they died faster. In the next batch (no new eggs yet) I want to try egg yolk in one container and micronized pellet food (soaked in fresh water overnight) to see if that might do something for them. Will post how that does when the eggs hatch.
As a side note, no luck with getting a pure strain of oithona, so I ordered 8 jars of Ecopods from algae barn and will try to siphon out the oithona to see if I can get a culture of that going. It may take a couple of weeks to get a culture going but will see.
As a side note, no luck with getting a pure strain of oithona, so I ordered 8 jars of Ecopods from algae barn and will try to siphon out the oithona to see if I can get a culture of that going. It may take a couple of weeks to get a culture going but will see.
Good luck!
Is the egg yolk and pellets for the Chromis larvae? I thought it was pretty certain that you will need a live food item, preferably copepod nauplii (Parvo) to get these to feed.
Maybe this is about the livebearer fry pictured above?
You generally do need live food to convince fish fry to feed, but in some cases fish fry will eat things like egg yolk. In this case, I wouldn't expect the fry to eat the yolk or pellets, but there's a chance they might.
Also, the OP has been trying Parvo pods with very limited success so far, so at this point we're thinking that the preferred pod for these guys is likely Oithona colcarva.
I'm assuming no real progress yet, but any updates here?
EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal
Just another girl who likes fish
Any updates?
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