Too many frys :(

i have too many frys - these are the frys i have:
Mesonauta egregius
krobia xinguensis
a. wolli
a. winkelfleck
a. sp Blutkehl
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I need a fry catcher but no one makes one
Sadly my IBs eggs were eaten so i have to study this problem as they should be easy to breed I think i might know what is happening but I'm not 100% sure yet.

anewbie said:

I need a fry catcher but no one makes one

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Make your own? It's more fun when something you make works

Cichlid fry should be left with their parents until they are no longer being cared for by the adults (they are around 1 month old at that stage). Then you move the fry into a rearing tank to grow. Moving fry too early stops them learning fish language and parental care.

Colin_T said:

Cichlid fry should be left with their parents until they are no longer being cared for by the adults (they are around 1 month old at that stage). Then you move the fry into a rearing tank to grow. Moving fry too early stops them learning fish language and parental care.

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Yes but i still have too many

Sigh just when i thought i had too many i had 3 more spawns
new batch of a. winkelfleck
l. araguaiae
and
a pair of angels.

I swear i didn't even know the l. araguaiae even spawned - oh well they are in an impossible location to feed. However i'll feed the a. winkelfleck.

any one wanna come over and catch some frys ?

Be glad you don't have guppies, I just had another batch of fry recently lol

Jinx_ said:

Be glad you don't have guppies, I just had another batch of fry recently lol

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At least with guppies mom knows how to eat them after giving birth

Fry are like moose. One fry, two fry... and you can also have too many moose.

This will sound worse than my fishbook editor line up there - many species that won't eat their own fry for the first month or so will eat other species. And after a month when the parents begin to prep for another brood, they will usually kill any juveniles that don't leave the territory and set out on their own. There are no fish basement dwelling nintendo boys. It's launch into life or die.

You can pay a high price for Cichlids like Apistogramma, and if you have the resources to grow them to sub adult size, many stores will give you a pittance for them. Most people don't have enough tanks to grow them out, and very few bought fish get to a second generation. Fry are easy to get, if you have the skills you clearly do. You're breeding challenging fish there. But it is a hard reality that this is a conservative hobby that fears change, and new or unknown species have very limited markets.

Beauties like Mesonauta egregius shouldn't end up as feeders, but they do. The market wants deformed parrots and flowerhorns.

I was always able to sell two or three pairs of young Apistos via my local aquarium club, and sometimes people would pay 5 bucks or so for a bag of 10 month old juvies, to take a chance on getting a pair down the line. Slow sellers are profit eaters for stores, so they rarely want unsexable fish.

GaryE said:

Fry are like moose. One fry, two fry... and you can also have too many moose.

This will sound worse than my fishbook editor line up there - many species that won't eat their own fry for the first month or so will eat other species. And after a month when the parents begin to prep for another brood, they will usually kill any juveniles that don't leave the territory and set out on their own. There are no fish basement dwelling nintendo boys. It's launch into life or die.

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With the species i have the parents have been pretty good around the previous generation frys - the males certainly leave them alone. In the case of the wolli all the frys migrated to the 2nd non-brooding female who accepts them. For the winkelfleck - they just don't care and for the a. sp blukies the male ignores them. As to what i will do with them that is an open debate i've been having for the past few months. The m. egregius are very nice indeed and i much prefer them to the m. festivus by a wide margin that i also have. They are also the perfect example of a group fish where pairs temporarily leave, brood and then rejoin the group. Very different than domestic angels though i wonder if wc altium are similar.

anewbie said:

At least with guppies mom knows how to eat them after giving birth

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They still are super skilled at mitosis

You can sell the fry on one of the online auction sites, such as Aquabid. I’ve been selling dwarf cichlids online for years and usually make back my initial investment and then some.

I don't sell fishes period. I sometime give fishes away but i don't want ot hear about selling so please don't mention it again in any of my threads.

anewbie said:

I don't sell fishes period. I sometime give fishes away but i don't want ot hear about selling so please don't mention it again in any of my threads.

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I get this, though few will read it and follow your suggestion. It's unfortunate, but selling moves them out. I've found it harder to give away fish than it has been to sell them. There's this weird mentality that says free has no value, and I find the lifespans of fish I gave away rather than sold disturbingly short. Humans have sick ways.

If you breed fish that give you say 40 young per brood every 6 weeks, you crash your tanks and lose the lot. It becomes a no win. I rarely sell my killies, but give away a lot of them. With dwarf Cichlids and the intolerance of young males for each other that's hard to maintain. Around here though, I can't sell them or give them away. There's no interest.

anewbie said:

I don't sell fishes period. I sometime give fishes away but i don't want ot hear about selling so please don't mention it again in any of my threads.

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I like that . I sold fish once and once only . A batch of Kribensis for store credit . For me , it wasn’t as satisfying as giving them away . I get what Gary is saying about people not valuing free things , it’s true almost all the time but anytime someone gave me fish I lavished my best care on them and usually got fry of my own from those gifts . In The American Killifish Association members “sell” fish for just the cost of shipping and their shipping supplies . The idea is to distribute fish and keep the hobby , and the fish in it , alive . Anybody out there have Blue Gularis they want to give away ?

GaryE said:

I get this, though few will read it and follow your suggestion. It's unfortunate, but selling moves them out. I've found it harder to give away fish than it has been to sell them. There's this weird mentality that says free has no value, and I find the lifespans of fish I gave away rather than sold disturbingly short. Humans have sick ways.

If you breed fish that give you say 40 young per brood every 6 weeks, you crash your tanks and lose the lot. It becomes a no win. I rarely sell my killies, but give away a lot of them. With dwarf Cichlids and the intolerance of young males for each other that's hard to maintain. Around here though, I can't sell them or give them away. There's no interest.

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Yea - what will happen is i will reduce the amount of bbs feeding for new frys of some species so fewer will make it - once i manage to par down some of the older frys then will feed more bbs. One thing i'm finding is a lot of the lit on # of fishes you can keep seems to only be true for small aquariums - the minute you give them larger homes you can keep more with controlled agression - of course this depends heavily on species. A 20 long/29 in most cases is only good for 1 or 2 f (if polygamous) and 1 male but if you got to 48x24 you can suddenly keep two or three males and 5 or 6 females though again it depends heavily on the species. Also allowing the frys to stay in the same aquarium as the parents depends heavily on the species but even with my wolli (which is typical nijjensi group) the fry simply migrated the non-brooding female territory and she doesn't mind them being there and no one else is going to chase them out. My situation with the wolli might be a bit unique from conversations with others - the very fact that the more dominant female (well larger/stronger) is the one not brooding means the brooding female just have to accept her territory and leave her be - here is a photo when they had a face down several months ago:


The one on the right is the brooding female. They actually locked lip which i presume was some sort of test of will. To my knowledge the one on the right has not challenged the one on the left again - her brooding spot is actually on the oppsite side of the aquarium in the very back so her approach here was i presume strictly business. The male himself has been behaving very weird and I asked another owner and he is unsure what is going on - he is completely submissive when around either female lying flat on the substrate - which is the most bizare thing i've seen a male do.