Baby Update!!

[Silver1]

Well all the babies have come out of hiding, and by some miracle I still have 35. They don't seem to be growing physically at all, only in activity. They're much stronger swimmers, they're all at the top, and they're even schooling a little bit. They seem very happy and get along well.

Daddy does not miss his chore as father, and his fins are growing back with no sign of infection. The mom is still indifferent to whether or not she even had babies, and is staring hungrily at them from her 1.5, the only creature she seems to miss is Admiral. Maybe we'll have another batch of fry in a few weeks.

 

[black angel]

i loved watching the male tend to the young, its fascinating to watch.. how old are your babies now?
maybe as they get some colour you can post pics of them

 

[Silver1]

Five days since they hatched, the dad decided he was done taking care of the babies at day two and started ignoring them. They don't look any bigger then when they were first hatched, but they grow more active every single day. How old are they when they start getting color?

 

[Alix]

i dont know how old they re when they start getting colors but it cant be more then acouple weeks

 

[Synirr]

They start to really colour up at around the 6th week

 

[Silver1]

Cool, thats not long to wait at all! One other question then:
I do my best to keep the tank clean and give them a variety of foods, but there seems to be one or two dead ones lieing at the bottom every day despite my best efforts. Is this normal? Or am I doing something wrong?

 

[Synirr]

They're about a week old, right? I lost one or two fry almost daily during the first week, but it was practically my first spawn (I don't think the real first one counts, because I had no idea what I was doing at the time ) so I may not be the best example of what's normal. I think my mistake was, when I changed the water, I did it very quickly the temperature and other water parameters may not have been identical to the tank water. What I started doing until the third week was syphoning the fresh water into the tank with a bit of airline tubing when I did water changes so that the new water was introduced slowly and the fry had more time to adjust to it... I only lost a couple of fry after I started doing that, so it might help in your case too

 

[Silver1]

Yeah, after the first week the babies pretty much stopped dieing. Or at least the past two days there has been no deaths.

I just had to post aain because the babies are doing sooooo well! There are five really huge ones that are so big they actually have more body then just a stomach, eyeballs and a tail! They're really powerful swimmers too with no traces of clumsiness.

 

[Synirr]

Glad to hear they're doing good!

 

[Silver1]

Well they had their first feeding of BBS today, and their cute little bellies are filled with orange! Unfortunately I found two more dead today, even with the careful waterchanges. They were looking poor the other day and I thought they might die, so it wasn't too big a shock. Tomorow they'll be two weeks old!