Milngavie Spawn

Looks like a tankful to me. Well done IMO.

You have loads well done, i need your luck at the mo all my spawns are getting to the point of having eggs eaten by the male...

Cant wait to see them grow up

Thx guys for the encouragement. If all goes well, they should be in the garage by next week and I'll be on to my second spawn for the year. Hope you're getting better luck with your spawns Nat. Just a thought, is the spawning tank in the way of heavy human traffic?

Milngavie wrote: is the spawning tank in the way of heavy human traffic?

No not really there's only me that uses the kitchen a lot the kids not allowed in only to go out to the garden. I may move the tank into the livingroom where i had my successful spawn.

looking good

Thx Wassy, I'm still wondering if I'm having a problem with the fry since some of they have one very small ventral and one developed ventral. Guess time will tell. They are mainly blues, greens and purples with a few very pale ones. Some are showing comb tail extensions. Some are hinting at a sort of BF banding on anal and dorsal fins but the colours seem reversed in the caudal.

i've missed a bit with you spawn log with not being as active as I should be...

short and missing ventrals are usually a result of mw feeding over a long period, live bbs is best

decaps un-hatchable are a good transition to powdered, flake and dried larvae food.

Its not the mw themselves but the fact they enourage bottom feeding, the gunk no matter how clean the tank is settles most on the bottom, the fry congregate at bottom where the mw land so this in turn increases the chance of fungal/bacteria infections that prevents the ventral natural growth

As Kel explained i found that in my CT spawn they had no ventrals but i did feed a lot of microworms so explained a lot when Kel mentioned to me.

What age would you consider a rule of thumb for changing from micro worms?

2tall wrote:What age would you consider a rule of thumb for changing from micro worms?

Good question. It's the faster growing ones that seem to be affected. The slower ones seem OK. There is hope yet as I can see some growth on the shorter of the two ventrals. BTW, the weird bit is that they are not BOTH missing. Only one ventral is stunted in comparison to the other. In some cases more so than others. I did feed MW for about 6 weeks in total.

i use apple snails as i think this helps.they keep the fry off the bottom eat up any left over food + i clean the bottom with a small pipe every other day!

just what i do no saying this works for everyone!!works for me tho

Thx for the tip Wassy. I'll look into snails for the next spawn. I dislike the cleaning bit because of the danger of sucking up the fry.

Some good news and some bad. Bad news first. The male died today. Something internal I guess. Pine coned in 2 days and was gone. Good news is that the fry are doing OK and are in new grow out tanks. A 2 foot tank for small ones and a 3 foot tank for the bigger ones. There was deffo a CT gene somewhere in the mix. Waiting for further growth to see what comes out of the mix

Sorry to hear about the male. They must get really taxed and stressed taking care of the fry.
Pure speculation on my part though. At least the fry are okay.

wassy82 wrote:i use apple snails as i think this helps.they keep the fry off the bottom eat up any left over food + i clean the bottom with a small pipe every other day!

just what i do no saying this works for everyone!!works for me tho

Sorry to hear about your male mine died recently too after he'd spawned and was removed from the babies its so sad

I agree with wayne i also use apple snails in my fry tank and kept the babies off the bottom...maybe it does help

Really sorry to hear about your male. Best of luck with all the fry. Have you got any current pics for us to see?

Yep got some here. Can't seem to get decent sized pics of the fry tho. Colour in the pics is a bit weird too. They look purple to my naked eye. Not much to shout about since they have VT genes but they are DT gene carriers so I hope that the next generation will be more interesting. LOL of course there is the possibility that they are just not growing as they should
As for the lack of ventrals, some are showing good growth, some uneven ventral growth and some are still missing.

Just to round up the spawn. I got some blues some rather curious dark with pale blue wash ones and some rather nice purples. Here's a few pics of my keepers. Looking to breed in some HM genes into the purple lot. Possibly get some pale blue lines going too. Who knows?

nice work!

they are beautiful, love the last pic

Lovely fry.
I have the same problem with my fry and micro worms, I have ended up with a few ventral less and a few with some long and some short.
Ill no for next time

I think they look super!

Thanks guys for the encouragement I have found that the ventrals do eventually grow but they are slow to grow. At least they have proven that my setup works for a large batch of fry. Got about 80 surviving fry in all. Guess I'm ready for some HM blood lines