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I would like to know from all the hobbyists who have bred this fish if they keep their fry with the adults? Why or why not? When do you seperate them?


Personally, I keep them in there as I have yet to see any aggression towards them from the adults and none of them look unhealthy. However, my only concern is that there might be too competition for the food.

I started out keeping the fry in the breeding tank. However, I was fortunated to have a series of spawns over 8 months that produced way too many fry to leave them all in the same tank. I was also somewhat leery about keeping "all my eggs in one basket" so I began comandeering other tanks for growout. I now have fry in a 10 gal, a 15 gal and the 30B with the adults.

Ideally I would prefer to leave the fry with the adults as I have found they seem to grow faster than the ones on their own in growout tanks do. As far as I have been able to tell the adults do not bother the fry.

I leave them with the group. Like TTT I have also found that they grow faster when left with the group, and never seen them bothered by the adults.

I also leave fry in with the adults, they do appear to grow faster than fry that are isolated. The adults do not appear to bother them, some of my oldest fry are approaching two years now and like to hang out in caves but they soon move out when an adult moves in. I guess it's probably best to move the older fry out soon before they are seen as a threat.

Adam

I also leave mine in with the adults. My first batch, the dad kicked the eggs out of the cave so I put them in a breeder trap. Two went missing, but I only found one body. I presumed the other died also, and just got eaten or something. Some time later, I spotted a dinky tail under one of the logs and realised it was the missing fry. He was significantly bigger and fatter than the ones in the breeder trap. And I was extremely vigilant in the feeding, etc, of the ones in the breeder. So I concluded that, seeing as this guy was from the same clutch of eggs as the ones in the trap, that they do better left to be raised by their own kind.

It's been nearly two years since those ones were born and there have been spawns since. I am only just getting round to moving them out of the adult tank, for two reasons: 1. The tank is getting crowded and 2. I want to get the young out before they reach a size that I might start confusing them with the adults, so I don't breed back to the parents unknowingly.

I let them live with the parents also...I just dont feed live food anymore to that tank!.

I leave the babies in with the parents until the male tries to spawn for the 3rd time with the previous spawns still in his cave, he's like that.

At first I stopped feeding blood worms, worrying about fry choking, but now I just keep feeding them like they are used to.

May not be what works for others but works with this group.

Great to see you have a well functioning group algae

but, i would like to caution people on the hazard of fry choking on bloodworms. it's happened too many times

Great that your male is working so hard to increase the population!

We have also left the fry in with the adults and they seem to be doing fine. I feed frozen bloodworm once a week and they also get frozen cyclops and daphina. As the fry are masters in hiding I don't get to see them as often as I would like to - but there has been no evidence of casualties.

The issue though is, there are three pairs that breed in this tank, and this way we can't know who is whose offspring. That will make things difficult when it comes to making new colonies, as we would rather avoid pairing siblings off.

Taking photos is also quite difficult, of course.

Caesars and Polleni

I keep my fry with the parents and I do agree they grow alot faster with their parents

Hi Caesars

Just wondering how big is your tank?So you have few pairs breeding in the same tank? i have problems with my alpha male he tend to eat or destroy other males egg clutches

Our tank is 250 litres but it is only 45 cm (h), so it has plenty of floor space. There are 7 caves in it. The second male breeds religiously every 4-5 weeks, the other 4 pairs are much more sporadic. The Alpha male eats his eggs. Having said that he has only done it when we saw he had eggs using a torch, so we don't know if he has had any successful spawns that we didn't notice, his cave is at the far back of the cave. Maybe he only destroys the eggs when disturbed ... He doesn't seem to care about the eggs of others though, he has never gone anywhere near their caves. Territories are very well established, and separated by pieces of wood and stones. Maybe this does the trick?

We were looking at the fry two days ago and I have to say that we didn't notice any difference in the size of those in the main tank when compared to those in the breeder.

Caesars and Polleni