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How hard can it be?

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:00 am
by jojo4rmdabronx
everyone seems to say taking care of zebs is difficult but is it really? I've successfully gotten Angels to breed every 7 days for months. I've kept dicus with not too much problems. So I think i know what i'm doing by now but just in case, I wanted to ask how does everyone rate the difficulty of breeding zebras?

if you were to rate the difficulty of breeding zebras on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the most difficult) what would you rate it?

i would say discus are about 6-7

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 4:21 pm
by Zebrapl3co
I think that answer would be "It depends."

In terms of breeding zebras as compare to breeding other plecos I'd give it a 6-7 as well.
But compare to Discus in your scale, I'd give it a 7-8 for the zebra. Basically because for the Discus, you can readily find them everywhere but the zebras are very hard to find in the stores. (actually, you won't find any.) So with the Discus, you can buy a bunch and then sort out the compatible pair and then resell the loners. Just this alone, you already did 1/3 of the work. For the zebras, you don't get much of that option available and even if you did manage to buy a bunch of them. You won't get a chance to find out which ones are good pairs until they actually breed. That will take years, not weeks.

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 5:46 pm
by TwoTankAmin
I have had multiple spawns from angels, discus, bn, zebs, danios, rainbows, corys, farlowellas, rosy barb, P nicholsi, killie and betta imbellis that I can recall. Almost all of these happened on their own with little special effort from me. In fact I have only acquired fish 3 times with the intention/hope of spawning them: sterbai cory, alf bn and zebras. I don't count my livebearers since having them not spawn is a lot harder than getting spawns.

The result is almost any fish that has spawned in my tanks I would have to rate as anywhere from a 1 to a 3 in difficulty- including zebras. My experience with most fish is that getting them to spawn is much easier than successfully having eggs hatch and then raising fry. This holds true for zebs especially.

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 10:15 pm
by Stevie.K
I have been lucky having 4 females spawn for me, the longest been 6 months from me owning the fish, the shortest 1 week!

I don't claim to be doing anything special other than keeping the water quality good, feeding the fish well & very regular checks on everything.

If the fish are healthy, happy & fit they will spawn when they are ready with very little help from us.

I bought all my fish as mature fish with the intention of been able to get them to spawn & have been very lucky.

I have had Angels & Discus spawn with very little effort in a community tank, where as a tank i was doing regular water changes with a pair of Discus i had no results!

Like TTA says it can be easy to spawn fish but raising fry can be a different matter, good luck with your zebs in the future.:wink: