Rummy’s group spawning… again

The group size of my Platinum Rummy’s is down to 8-10, but they are group spawning again this morning, at 1st light… they have done this before, I had posted about it, but can’t find the post… I’m sure nothing will come of it in a community tank… even if a couple eggs were to find their way into the large masses of pothos roots, the biggest angel was actively hunting the cardinal tetras I tried to introduce before, so any fry, wouldn’t last long… but the group spawning is sure interesting to watch…

A lot of softwater fish will spawn, but the eggs are often infertile unless you've gotten the water and conditions right. A lot of tetras are also producers of eggs killed by exposure to light.

I used to get Asian harlequins spawning like mad in one of my communities, but never made the effort to try to raise them, or have them spawn under the right conditions. One of my daughter's friends, a kid, once mentioned she had dozens of them overpopulating their tank and didn't know how to slow them down. Go figure...

These are in my “most balanced tank” it’s been a long time since I actually “checked the Ph” but suspect it’s the in the medium / high 6’s, and this is the tank that has filtered light through about 18 inches of vegetation, and one pothos root ball is particularly impenetrable to any much bigger than fry… so it’s not impossible… but not something I’ve been trying to achieve… I would think Rummy “wigglers” would be really tiny…

This is a zoom photo, sorry, but the one that is brighter silver in the middle must be a female full of eggs… I think the silver is just that she is “rounder” than the rest, and it how she catches the light, because of the shape difference

So I added another 6 Rummy’s ( numbers were down a little from my original purchase ) but that hasn’t stopped the original group from spawning every couple weeks… the newest are tiny, and not joining in on the chase, but my older group are at it again… did water change yesterday, and have heard that that can trigger it on several species??? Maybe as the pothos root tangles continue to develop there could be the chance for a few eggs to hatch, that the angel fish doesn’t predate???

These guys sure are active… they seem to spawn, once a week the school is currently 12-14 of them, and they seem to like to spawn at 1st light, so I get some activity to watch with my caffeine, in the morning… sometime, a few of those eggs are going to hatch… there shouldn’t be too much light, the whole tank is shaded by the giant Pothos vines and peace lilies… looks a lot brighter in the camera than the naked eye…