Breeding A Pair Of Cherry Barbs

[JollieMollie]

Just out of curiosity...

How are cherry barbs with breeding? Are they difficult to breed, or pretty easy? What do they need? I seem to remember something about them laying eggs on the bottom sides of plants, but that may have been another species. Could I just pluck the plant leaf and put it in a netted breeding thing so the fry survive? How big will they need to be before they can breed? (My male is kinda tiny, but he's a pretty red color too)


Thanks (-:


In case you're wondering about my specific tank btw, I have a 29 gallon, just starting out. Rather than use chemicals and test kits I'm going old fashioned and just slowly adding fish. I had plants in there for awhile and then a couple fish, now have a total of two guppies, two cherries, a male betta (doesn't bother the guppies at all, yay!), and an african dwarf frog. I wish to allow the guppies to breed and keep what fry survive to help populate my tank on my miniscule, poor starving college student budget. I wanted the cherries just because, but it occoured to me it's possible they'd breed, I don't know. Anyway, I don't have parameters on the tank, but everyone is healthy and showing no signs of stress. My water is hard here and the buffering capacity is in the ideal range according to my little test strips that I got on sale somewhere.


(-:

 

[Lateral Line]

In clean water, Barbus titteya will scatter eggs around plants frequently. In hard water though, they are unlikely to hatch, the Calcium ions in the water react with the egg shells making them to tough for the fry to emerge. The other fish will find and eat most of the eggs anyway.

To breed and raise egglaying fish with any level of real success requires the use of seperate breeding tanks. Occasionally, in a really well planted tank, a few fry may survive long enough to escape predation.

 

[JollieMollie]

Is it possible to safely and easily soften hard water?

 

[Lateral Line]

Not really. The problem is you have dissolved salts in the water, these need to be removed to soften water.

Typically, when setting up a soft water tank, you remove any possible sources of salts, (limestone, chalk, shells, coral sand all manner of stuff), then fill the tank with water from a reverse osmosis system. This is usually to soft to be usable, and you add small quantities of stabilising salts, (Kent RO Rite for example).

Water that is very soft has no pH buffering capability, and can swing wildly in pH over short timescales, like from pH7 in the evening to pH4 in the morning. This is usually fatal to any fish.

There are products around that will make wild claims about adjusting your chemistry, but these are simply adding more salts, usually acid and alkali phosphates, which in turn can cause additional problems, (algae blooms for example).

Unless you really understand your chemistry, messing with hardness and pH is best left alone.

If you leave the guppies to nature, and you have a little cover for the fry to hide, you will not have space for much more soon anyway.

 

[reid2144]

In clean water, Barbus titteya will scatter eggs around plants frequently. In hard water though, they are unlikely to hatch, the Calcium ions in the water react with the egg shells making them to tough for the fry to emerge. The other fish will find and eat most of the eggs anyway.

To breed and raise egglaying fish with any level of real success requires the use of seperate breeding tanks. Occasionally, in a really well planted tank, a few fry may survive long enough to escape predation.

how can you tell when cherry barbs are pregnant

 

[Lateral Line]

Barbs are externally fertilised egg laying fish, as such, they never become pregnant. When full of eggs, females are noticeably deeper in the body and wider when viewed from above or the front. If there is a male in the tank, she will never really fill as he will drive her and the pair will scatter eggs most days. Females kept alone can get very "fat", indeed, most serious breeders keep the sexesseperate so that when moved into the spawning tank, they get a good clutch of eggs.

 

[Hawkins]

Ok well if you want some more success try putting marbles next to each other on the bottom of the tank. If the eggs fall between the marbles then they will not be eaten as the fish can't get to them.

I think it will be too hard to breed them with the other fish in the tank