Banggai Cardinal Spawning Log

[howaboutme]

Awesome to hear! I mentioned a previous member doing similar a few years back. I found the thread.

 

 

Worth a look to compare. Continue the good job.

[DaJMasta]

Thanks for pointing it out.  Looks like the timelines are about the same (which I suppose is expected, but is good), and the collection methods seem to vary quite a bit!

 

I've been keeping an eye on the sideways swimming one and while he does seem to be acting the same as always, he's one of the smaller fish and doesn't seem to be pursuing the TDO much.  Not exactly sure what I can do to try to help him along, so I will continue to feed and monitor as I have been.

[JMsAquarium]

@DaJMasta, this is an awesome post. I love it. Please keep it going. Congratulations. If you ever decide to sell some of them, please let me know. 
 

[DaJMasta]

Thank you.  I certainly don't have the space for 20 more adults in my E170, so when they're mature enough to be able to swim and eat with the bigger guys I will be looking to find them new homes.

[FishingandReefing]

That’s a good news. Pretty sure they will go quick. I got 7 in my 120g and love them. 

[JMsAquarium]

Awesome. I’d rather buy from you than from a store. It’s helps sustainability.

[DaJMasta]

Some less good news as things go along: I lost the little guy who was having trouble swimming upright.  It seemed like he wasn't eating that reliably, so I had been keeping an eye on him, and yesterday early he started spending a good bit of time on the substrate, so I scooped him into a breeder net and tried to feed some extra TDO and live food, though with little interest taken.  In swimming around in the box, it became clear that the reason he was having trouble swimming was that he didn't have a front fin on the left side.  I can't say if this was developmental or damage at some point - while I've seen very limited aggression looking play among them recently, his swimming issues go back a week or more, and it could have been that as the babies transitioned to a full body wiggle to a more standard cardinal swim pattern it just wasn't obvious early on and he had it from birth.  It was also clear in the breeder box that he was at least the more grown body shape, elongated top to bottom and rounded on the underside, so he had certainly been eating at some point.

Sad to have a loss, though not entirely unexpected in the process, but the other 19 seem to be doing as well as ever.  They know the pattern when they get fed and come up to the surface when I start mixing the TDO in water and still go craziest for the live food (which may be the smallest food they get when I transition to exclusively TDO B2).  While I do see the occasional fish chasing another (for a couple of body lengths, but you can tell by the speed and direction), it's nothing continuous, and I see no nipping, so I think they're getting along (and I think they're supposed to until they are adults).


How about a picture: they are normally silver/whitish on the inside, but these guys look a little pink.... bellies full of TDO!

Edited September 26, 2021 by DaJMasta

[DaJMasta]

Still have 19, not a lot to report, but they are getting bigger...

 

 

I'm feeding TDO B2, daily apocyclops copepods, and a squirt of what I'm feeding the main tank - though I try to not get any whole frozen stuff because it's all too large for them still, and they go for all of it but the fastest movement and most chasing definitely comes from the copepods, even though their size hasn't changed and the babies can probably fit much bigger stuff in their mouths.  Will probably start with TDO C1 (extra small) in a few days and then use both for a bit before switching to the larger size.  The high end of particle sizes for the C1 size are close to 1mm, so by the time they're looking for something bigger they can probably fit whole capelin roe in their mouths and can start getting normal tank diet as well too.

 

A little bit to my surprise, I haven't really fowled the water yet.  There's a little algae growth on the back, but it's not that substantial, so it seems like the active tank and filtration media seems gone far to keep things clean.  I think some of it is the frequent feedings of small amounts and some is the addition of phyto and pods that help to some degree, but while I'm sure I will need to going forward, my only water changes basically have been removing water because of the salt added with the daily phyto.

Here's them eating a bit before lights out tonight:

 

[DaJMasta]

Another week, another update.  Still have 19 increasingly less little guys swimming around in there, and all is continuing steadily.  I had a few days this past week where I wasn't home enough to feed the normal ~4 times a day, and they seem to be no worse for wear.  I tried the next size up of TDO, C1/X-Small, a few days ago and only a couple seemed to be able to eat it, but by today most of them got a piece - still not all, but I think in the coming week I'll be switching them over to that instead of mainly the B2.  Pulled one out of the back chamber over the weekend after removing the screen on the overflow last week, but it seemed to be fine before and after scooping it back into the display.  They're active enough that getting a picture with them even mostly in focus seems nearly impossible.

 

Today marks 30 days post hatch and just about two months since spawn, and the size differential between the largest and smallest fry still definitely shows.  This picture is from one of the smaller ones and I think the biggest one yesterday or the day before, and even with the poor focus, you can really see the body size difference and even an apparent difference in eye placement - I think it sort of stays higher on the face when the body fills in more.  While I doubt they'll be a danger to each other in the next couple weeks, I think I will be transferring some of the larger ones to a new tank before the end of the month, at least, both to make sure they don't fight with/eat each other and to spread the bioload out since the tank is only 3.5g, though it has yet to show signs of poor water quality.

 

 

The X-Small TDO also seems to sink faster, so I will probably stop trying to mix it with water and pouring it in like I have been with smaller sizes.  Apocyclops feedings will probably continue for another week or two, they still seem to like them even if they are very small.  I tried both calanus and caplin roe this week but they didn't seem to be able to eat either... I wouldn't be surprised if the big ones could manage a whole calanus within a week.

[DaJMasta]

Another week.... and very little to report.  They're slowly getting bigger, though it's still hard to tell, and they aren't yet big enough to eat a whole PE Calanus (or maybe they just haven't been adventurous enough to try).  Feeding mostly X-Small TDO now, but still some B2 and they still like it well enough, and there seems to be less of a feeding response to the Apocyclops, though they do still eat it.

They seem to have gotten more afraid of me in the last week - maybe they're looking farther away, maybe they're influenced more by their brothers and sisters, but I can now come up to the tank, lean my head to one side and they run to the other, then lean to the other side to chase them to the opposite side of the tank.  There are also a couple that start to sort of freak out when emptying the large sieve of apocyclops, though they recover quickly, sort of like when their parents are spooked.  Odd, though, since I've been doing that daily with the same sieve for their entire lives.  I definitely see more of the behavior of retreating to cover when they're spooked, now.  No long spine urchins like in the wild, but they just huddled up in the macroalgae when I was shining a light in there after lights out for a minute or so.

 

I am still seeing very slight "aggression" where one just sort of pulses towards another who is deflected, and a couple of the smaller ones are staying more in a corner of the tank or under the ball of macroalgae, but they still come out to eat and I don't see any substantial aggression towards them.  I don't know if they're big enough to justify a larger tank, but as I've got a second one with the inhabitants moved out of it, I think I will split off the largest ones (maybe 8 or 9) into the second tank this week, just to be sure there isn't any issue with the slower growing fishies.

[DaJMasta]

Split the group today, maybe had 10 or 11 I could have moved to the 'large fish' tank, but opted for 9 to try and balance the bioload.  I don't know if its their size or that they're in a new tank, but the larger group (left side) sticks to the macroalgae like it's an urchin or other bit of cover, whereas the smaller fish in the original tank are much more spread out, like before.

 

 

Underneath, the phytoplankton cultures brew....

[JMsAquarium]

Looking good, you are doing an a awesome job 

[DaJMasta]

Thanks, a bit of news today:

The bad first - I'm worried about one of the smaller ones.  He's been swimming a bit less recently and is now spending some time on the bottom resting.  I think the problem is he hasn't been eating the TDO - which I don't think is common among the smaller ones, but maybe is, as he hasn't gone for it in the past few days, but perks up when the apocyclops are added.  I do have some new copepod species in culture now, but the cultures are really too small to feed out of in any quantity, so it may be a few days before I can really increase the amount of live food added.  I suspect their preference for live food probably has slowed the growth of some of them, at least in the right side tank.  I think part of the issue is also that TDO just sinks pretty fast, so they don't have a lot of time to pick out of the water column, especially if they are intimidated by other fish.  I think a tank with a fully rounded bottom (thinking a kreisel) and some laminar flow along it could help recirculate the TDO and give the fish who only eat out of the water column another crack at it.  Another option could be a slower falling food, but especially in the very small sizes, I don't know what that would be.  I may try frozen cyclops in the future since the frozen calanus are still too large for them, and frozen foods seem to stay suspended for MUCH longer.

Then the (probably) good news.... the parents have decided I have four weeks left to raise the babies:

 

33 days after being returned to the main tank, 40 days post hatch, 66 days since last spawn.  I don't know if these cardinals are seasonal spawners, but at this rate the male will only spend half of his adult life able to eat!

[DaJMasta]

The fry I was worried about last week held in there and seemed to have gotten better in the days following, but I found it in the rear chamber yesterday without enough energy to eat, so I am down to 18.  While it may have been one that has only eaten a very small amount of TDO (some of the smaller ones seem to pay less attention to it), I also think there is some bullying going on.  I'm not seeing much in terms of fin damage, but there are a couple of smaller ones that sort of stay in the corner of the tank a lot of the time (a behavior I've seen a bunch before in other aggression problems), and they do the seemingly normal fish thing that if they are being bullied and are stressed about it, they don't eat or don't eat much even when there's plenty of food.

 

In the tank with the larger fry, there is a little bickering that I see, but they generally stick together as a group - maybe it's harder to single one out when they look a bit more similar in size, or maybe they are just aggressive enough eaters to have the energy to get back in after being chased a bit.

There are still a couple smaller ones that fit the general mold above, but hopefully I can feed them enough to keep them growing.  My new zooplankton cultures (pseudodiaptomus and parvocalanus) that they should be able to start feeding something tomorrow, and a couple of days ago I designed and printed up some feeding rings.  My approach before had been to mix the TDO with water and then pour it in (keeps it from going over the overflow), but while the fish went for it, because it was in the water column in bursts, a bunch of it ended up making it to the bottom before it was eaten.  With the feeding ring, it drops into the water column at a slower rate, so the total feeding time is longer and there's more time for fish off in a corner to realize there's food and come over - at least that's the hope.  The design of the ring is available here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5026730

 

[DaJMasta]

Today marks 52 days post hatch, and they continue to grow.  Not a lot to say, but the difference in behavior between the two groups is still interesting.  I recorded feeding PE calanus with particulate food (a normal rotation in the main tank) and the bigger ones are now eating frozen calanus, as well as a feeding with a mix of TDO XS and B2.

 

 

They're certainly getting bigger, and despite a lot of feedings per day (probably too many at 5: 3 of TDO, one of what the tank gets, one of copepods), it's not a hugely fast process.  I don't think their general behavior has changed much since last week other than them realizing what the new TDO feeding routine is and sort of moving up towards the feeding ring after I drop it in.

The bigger fry are probably about an inch in total length, but that puts the body size around a quarter of an inch, which is still too small for a lot of the normal frozen foods.  Capelin roe are the next goal, then hikari mysis, then they can basically eat everything I feed the main tank and are probably a good size to find new homes.

 

[DaJMasta]

The little guys keep on growing.  I've seen a few of them swallow whole Hikari mysis (smaller mysis, but still, big food for little fish!)  For whatever reason, their father is no longer carrying a new clutch of eggs - I don't think anything in particular triggered a problem in the tank, so maybe they just weren't fertilized or something?  In any case, he's back to eating and there's not timer on when these guys have to move over for more, smaller fish.  I think they're still too small to send off to new homes and compete with the high flow of a full tank, but now that they're eating full sized food, it may not be long.

 

 

 

They look just like adults now!  Still a lot smaller, but the body shape is right, and best I can tell their behavior is basically the same as the fully grown ones.

[DaJMasta]

Continuing similarly but with a little more sad news and an new addition.  I lost one more out of the tank of smaller fish, now down to 17 fry in total.  I don't really know what happened to it, but I've seen a couple fish spending a little time on or near the bottom, and they're generally less active than the fish in the other tank.  To that end, I don't think it's good for them, especially seeing the behavior of other adult fish, and given that the more eager eaters and faster growers in the other tank are much more active swimmers and tend to stick together more.

Given that, and that I was concerned about the time spent drifting through the water column the food had, I decided to drop a small pump in the display of both tanks.  This is the smallest pump I had, with the nozzle removed for a more diffuse flow and turned down with its adjustment, but it's still a pretty substantial increase over just the pump from the rear chamber.  In the hours since adding it, they're staying up more and together more, and the food does spend more time drifting (and drifts more erratically), both things that seems to entice their parents into eating more.  If they won't eat the TDO, I don't know how much I can do for them, even with my daily feedings of live copepods of a number of types, but I'm hoping the increased activity and the moving around food gets them to eat more and grow more quickly.

In the other tank, the little ones still are getting bigger, but it's a much slower process than I had immediately hoped.  I do feel like they are getting bigger before my eyes, but it's been pretty difficult to quantify, and even to get a reasonable guess at how big they actually were.  One of the middle sized ones in the tank with the larger fish I caught in a net so I could get a better look at it without being deep in the tank, and so there's a more constant size reference there.  The net is a 5" medium coarse net, and I figure from nose to fin this one is about an inch.  They're two months from being released from their father's mouth!

[DaJMasta]

Busy week so later update, and unfortunately, more losses.  I'm down to 13 now, and all of the losses in the last week were in the tank of smaller fish.  No real ammonia, no predation or aggression that I could see, so I think the problem was the 'selection pressure' of the powerhead.  My guess is that the fish that weren't eating the prepared food(s) didn't have the energy to survive in the long term in the higher flow, and just slowly disappeared.

I don't know if there was a lot that I could have done, alternatively, because their final homes are going to be fairly high flow tanks fed with prepared foods, so I don't know that trying to feed even more live food is really a long term solution - I've been feeding each tank around 5% of 7 gallons worth of fairly mature copepod cultures at this point, and I don't really have the space for more of them.  I think feeding more of the live food earlier on should give more fry a jumpstart in their early development, so that hopefully I can add the secondary powerhead earlier, before they're on the TDO XS size, and there's more small food transition time when they're all in the same tank and can presumably learn from each other.

In any case, though the numbers are more significantly down than before, the 9 in the tank of ones that were eating better are all just fine, and the four that remain in the original tank seem to be doing well in the higher flow environment.  I will probably move a few back to balance the load, but I also think that with the growth rate, I'll start looking for new homes for the babies starting around the beginning of December.  The smallest ones may not be quite there yet by then, but I think I've got a couple that are probably big and strong enough to make it in a full on reef tank now.

[DaJMasta]

 

One down in the last two weeks, actually on Thanksgiving day, but the remainder seem to be spry and healthy.  Almost three months from when they hatched, and I think that will be when I offer them up to new homes.  They're probably not big enough to hold their own against large, somewhat aggressive fish, but I think they're strong enough to handle fairly high flow tanks and will eat enough variety of stuff that they will do well in proper reef tanks.  Look for a thread over the weekend or early next week in the buy/sell forum!

[DaJMasta]

A few days ago I transferred the male into one of the small tanks for another round... I think they're maturing slower with the degree (Celsius) cooler temperature, so in my time looking through the camera today, I haven't seen any faces peaking out, but you can see under his jawline the sort of silver accordion folds that are signifying the sort of maximum size of his mouth, so they're probably within a few days.  It could also be that they've already hatched (they had at this point the last time) and he's just doing a better job of keeping his mouth shut!

 

The goal this time is two things: higher final survival rate and quicker early stage growth.  I hope both of these are accomplished with larger quantities of live food available for the very early stages of development to get them jumpstarted, though the temperature in the tanks is definitely down, so I don't know how noticeably a modest growthrate increase would actually be visible.

Behavior wise, last night was the first time he really hid, something I saw the first time around in the small tank as well, where he actually hugged up next to a rock for a while after dark.  During the day, but moreso in the evening, he's been going up to the glass and challenging his reflection more than a couple of days ago when the mouth was not as visibly puffed out as well.  The expansion of his mouth also makes his cheeks look more silvery than normal, and one of the more reliable ways to see that he's carrying eggs when they are smaller is that puffed out bit of the center lower jaw.  That's just inline with the jaw normally, but when he's got something big in his mouth it protrudes giving a lot more chin.

Edited December 15, 2021 by DaJMasta

[DaJMasta]

Well this spawn has been an unusual one.  He showed all the normal signs of progression, perhaps a tad bit slower than the last time, and then on Wednesday after the last post, he opened his mouth all the way and sort of did the normal thrashing/coughing to eject them... but no babies came out.  I caught some of it on video, and while in retrospect I think you can see a small group of them (or egg mass?) early on, I also get a pretty good view into his mouth and saw nothing.  I had seen some of what looked like movement in there before, but never the reflection of the eyes of the fry that I saw the last time.

 

Big mouth!

However, after all that, he still had an inflated mouth and was acting as before, so I waited.

The next day, in the early afternoon, I saw babies!  At least 3 initially, but eventually 4, and from how long they were in development, I would say they were around 2 days post hatch when unleashed (or evicted, your choice).  I watched to see if there would be more coming, but his mouth returned to normal size, and in the evening he started swimming around the little tank more and acting a little more aggressive towards his reflection.  Not sure if more were coming, I left him in the tank overnight, since the last time he didn't return to eating for another day or two.  In the morning there were no more let out and he wasn't acting like he had more to give, so I moved him back to the main tank.

 

Edited December 20, 2021 by DaJMasta

[DaJMasta]

Well something went wrong with the last post, somehow the youtube video overwrote a good chunk of what I wrote.

 

Basically, the babies in the video are from the day they were released, and you can barely see a stump of a forward dorsal fin, whereas in the picture from today you can see it growing out.  They video babies also have the reddish tone and rounder shape from the yolk sack and probably just the shape of being in the egg, and while they are stronger swimmers now, they still don't have their swim bladder developed yet, so the swim in a similar fashion, constantly wiggling to stay up, even though a few have made trips farther up in the tank.  They also all seem to hang out together, it took them a day or two to group together in this spot, but two were basically together from the start.

[Steve G]

Thanks for this thread. I came back from vacation and found two fry in my overflow so I guess I am an accidental banggai breeder! I hope they live. My over flow is pretty big, like 15 gallons. 

[DaJMasta]

Good luck!  A few hours after that post my four all started swimming around, so this one week or so point from hatch seems to be around when the swim bladder is starting to work.

In your case, especially in an established tank they should have a reasonable source of pods to get started on.  If they are in a relatively cryptic area (low flow), they also won't have to be as strong swimmers or have to use up as much energy, which are both helpful early on.  If you can get them to a low flow area of a sump with sponge or something over the outflow to keep them from being sucked in, that's probably a good place for them.  Otherwise, a breeder box will probably work well for flow, but depending on mesh size/type, copepods likely won't be able to get through, so you'd have to catch some and transfer them in, probably daily, until they start taking prepared foods.

[DaJMasta]

Some updates first:

Of the four I got from the spawn, only one remains.  I had them in one of the 3.5G tanks and I eventually put a kreisel in the front, so they didn't have much space, were hard to see, and eventually even had a pump in the display portion with them, and whatever happened, I lost track of and then lost the other three.  The remaining guy I brought over to my new system when I consolidated those tanks into it as the first fish in the sort of breeding rack I've made.

About a week and a half or two weeks after the male was returned to the main tank, they spawned again!  She actually was doing the dance within a day of him returning, but in the interest of getting to eat something before another month without food, they didn't spawn immediately.  That spawn hatched a week ago, but I took a bit of a different method and saw some interesting stuff that I didn't know before.

 

First off, having noted that the male really didn't start eating until the second day after the hatch, I didn't really feel like I needed to separate him quickly, and given that he mostly wants to stay put and hide in that time, I tried just housing him in a breeder box in the main tank until they hatched.  I caught him in the same fish trap (with the breeder box in the tank already over top of it to make some shade, they seem to like hanging out under overhangs), caught the male, and then just dumped him into the breeder box - no new tank parameters, no time out of the water.  I also gave him a bit of cover (a top from a hang on box tilted sideways to make a cave, then a second blocking a third or so of the top of the breeder box) and let him do his thing.  He hid in the cave the first day, then mostly hung out in the shade, but he showed less stress than when moved to a separate tank (no fighting his reflection, less running away from me).

 

I didn't see any babies in his mouth for the first two days, but then one appeared on the bottom of the breeder box, and it looked like an even earlier stage of development

 

It really looks more like an egg than a fish, but you can see a faint tail, and while it lay on its side most of the time, it eventually was one of the survivors.  A couple of days later, more came.... along with the full egg mass.

Now since the male spit out the egg mass, which probably indicates he doesn't think they're viable, but there were probably more than a dozen of pairs of little eyes in there along with some obviously dead eggs (opaque white), and they were all held together by a sort of gelatinous mass that actually stuck on its own to the bottom of the breeder box.  I tried to blow some water by them on occasion to see if I could observe any movement in the eggs or aid in a fish breaking out, but after a couple of days of nothing more coming out, I think he was right in thinking those eggs were no longer viable.  I got 12 fry out of this spawn, but there was probably 3x the eggs in total, maybe more.  When the new breeder system had screen over the intake net on the middle level, and after feeding the fry copepods in this breeder box for a couple days, I moved them over, and they mostly took up residence in one corner.

 

I had moved the male back into the tank (really just lowered the breeder box and waited for him to leave, corralling one fry that tried to swim out back into the box) the day after the egg mass was spit out, he was quickly greeted by his mate, and he started eating the following evening... but this time she only gave him a few days as today they spawned again and he is back to fasting.  He looked pretty thin this last time, so I don't know if he'll last the whole time this time, but she really isn't giving him much time to recover and put on some weight.

 

Also, interestingly, the female has become the most aggressive fish in the tank - something I really wouldn't have expected out of a cardinal, even in a tank of all mild mannered fish.  She will, a few times a day, now chase the fairy wrasse through the whole tank, though he is much faster/more agile.  She seems to be most active/defensive when around her mate and especially near spawning or near hatch time, and sometimes goes after other fish who wouldn't normally have been noticed and in months past were completely ignored.  Also interestingly, when the male was in the breeder box she was noticeably more subdued, it definitely does seem to be some kind of defensive behavior when her mate is around.  A couple times since they spawned today I've seen the male sort of cough and rearrange the eggs, and if they're sticking out of his mouth even a little she swims around him and tries to help or run interference or something, it's kind of funny to watch.