New Fry - Holiday Care - Help !

[StatMan]

So first post on this site and I guess like many I am looking for advice of the experts that frequent this board.

Our situation, we (actually the kids) recently (3 months ago) bought a tank. Instead of rushing out to buy fish the tank was allowed to go through the cyle so that it was right for the fish when we brought them, it is a community tank of 50L. Primarily livebearers:

2 Sunset Platy - Female
1 pair Hawaiian Platy
2 Sword Tails - Male
2 Tuxedo Guppies - Male
1 pair Blue Moscow Guppies
1 pale cream / yellow Guppie - female
2 golden loaches
1 Siamese fighting fish - male
4 Glowlight Tetras

We also have a Hawaiian Platy Juve - 2months and 4 x 1cm Guppie Juves in the "main" tank.

On Tuesday one of the Sunsets must have dropped some fry and we have 11 of these in a Plastic 3 in 1 breeding trap, this wa unexpected as we did not see any obvious signs of pregnancy, but were looking out for fry as we knew the hawaiian female was due, she dropped on Wednesday and we have 12 fry from her in the same "breeding trap". There are also 4 x 2 week old guppy fry who were already in the trap.

We would like to give the fry a chance to grow and select a few to keep and pass on the rest. So to that end I bought a 60L tank on eBay that I saw advertised in my town with a bumblebee Catfish + 4 others, from the picture it looked like the 4 were just Tetras, the idea being we could use this for the fry. It turned out that 2 of the "others" were Gourami one Golden and one Moonlight / Silver and 5cm+ in size with a large mouth, not a good place for fry in my opinion. So we have decided to keep that as a second tank to house some of the keepers when they are large enough.

So then I went and bought one of the £38 54L tanks from Aldi that some one on here drew my attention to.

Now to the problem, we go away for two weeks on Sunday. I have the two tanks above cycled and ready to go (water came with the second tank) but with fish that would probably go for the fry. I have a new tank but it is not setup. We have a friend who has fish of his own who will come by a couple of times, once in the first week and once in the second week but with a week gap in the middle.

What do I do with the fry, Put them in the first tank, put them in the second tank, try and fast track (can this be done) the new tank(which will now be used for fry and "births"), leave them in the breeding trap (what about food if we only have blocks and occasional visitis?). Do I get a tank divider for the second tank and section off 25-33% for the fry?

At the end of the day we would like to maintain as many survivors as possible for when we return, just not sure of the best approach.

So for those of you that have read this far, thank you. It was a choice between short and sweet or try and provide all info up front.

What would you do and why?

Thanks for any advice

 

[Colin_T]

put tha baby fish in a tank and add a heap of plants. Put a light on the tank and have it running for 16hours per day. The light will help the plants grow and should also encourage algae. The fry will feed on the micro-organisms living on the plants, and they will graze on the algae.

Bumblebee catfish get big (about 6-8inches) and eat small fish.

 

[OldMan47]

I would guess that even with Colin's emergency measures in your new tank, you will come home to very few survivors. Even the one week gap is more than fry can easily survive going hungry, so Colin's micro-organism approach is your best bet but I doubt you can cram enough plants into 54 litres to support that many fry. Another thing that you can try if you can lay hands on live daphnia is to use them as a babysitter. They will be too big for the fry to eat but they produce their own young at a very high rate and may produce enough to give you some added food or the fish fry.

 

[malakye]

Is there no way you can get your friend to go in a more often? What about automated feeders? I haven't used them personally so don't know if they would be any good or not but someone on here might know.

 

[StatMan]

put tha baby fish in a tank and add a heap of plants. Put a light on the tank and have it running for 16hours per day. The light will help the plants grow and should also encourage algae. The fry will feed on the micro-organisms living on the plants, and they will graze on the algae.

Bumblebee catfish get big (about 6-8inches) and eat small fish.

Colin Thanks for the response, not sure of which tank to use, I can't see me getting the new tank to anything useable in a day which leaves the existing tanks, the original one with the majority of fish seems not an option, Oldman seems to suggest that even if I load a tank full of plants its going to be difficult but maybe what e are looking for here is increasing the survival rate . My gut feeling at the moment is to split the 60 litre tank temporarily 20/40 put the fry in the 20 which is better than the trap, add as many plants as possibe and follow your lighting reccomendations.

Have attached a picture of the Bumblebee Catfish I think from research it is a siamese or Asian variety, which do not grow as large? This one is about 2+ inches after 9 months, according to previous owners

I would guess that even with Colin's emergency measures in your new tank, you will come home to very few survivors. Even the one week gap is more than fry can easily survive going hungry, so Colin's micro-organism approach is your best bet but I doubt you can cram enough plants into 54 litres to support that many fry. Another thing that you can try if you can lay hands on live daphnia is to use them as a babysitter. They will be too big for the fry to eat but they produce their own young at a very high rate and may produce enough to give you some added food or the fish fry.

I think I know an LFS that does Daphina so I will add that in to the final "solution"

Is there no way you can get your friend to go in a more often? What about automated feeders? I haven't used them personally so don't know if they would be any good or not but someone on here might know.

Am going to try and persuade my brother to come round in the middle of the 7 day stint to break it up.

Not Sure if I can get an auto feeder that woud work with the lid down, or is it OK to have the lid slightly open???


Many Thanks to everyone for your replies, very much appreciated, I'll update with the results on my return.

 

[StatMan]

So I promised to update with the outcome so here goes...

In the end after much consideration I decided that the new tank was not an option and decided to do the best I could in the existing tank.

I have two breeding traps, one a 3 in 1 and the other a 5 in 1. So I decided to split the fry across the two traps.

As the Sunset Platy fry were the smallest I put the majority of them in the 3 in 1 and then the hawaiian fry and guppies in the 5 in 1. Here is the breakdown of how I split them up:

3 in 1: 9 sunset fry and 2 hawaiian fry
5 in 1: 11 hawaiian fry 2 sunset fry and four older guppie fry

I also bought some Tetra mini baby food.

I asked our friend who was feeding the fish to leave a largish abount of liquifry food in the traps when he was away for several days as in experience it tends to stay in mounds for a while until eaten. Also I found that the Tetra mini food would tend to float on the surface for a couple of days allowing the fish to pick it off also.

Also for the long break a 3 day feeding block was dropped into each trap, not sure how much use this would be for the fry but if they could get something from it then I was tryin to cover all options.

So come the Saturday evening before we departed I split the fry as described above and added the daphina suggested by oldman47 to each of the traps and went to bed.

Early the next morning with the taxi in the driveway I looked at the tank, to my horror several of the fry from the 5 in 1 tank had escaped out into the main tank, I have now learnt that although sold as ideal for bithing fry these traps are not made to a close enough tolerance to stop the fry escaping out the bottom when you don't want them to. Due to timing there was little I could do but let the escaped fry fend for themself in the main tank.

Upon our return we have had a fairly good outcome:

3 in 1 tank had 8 out of 9 sunset platy fry and the 2 hawaiians
5 in 1 tank had 2 out of 11 hawaiian platy fry (the rest had more or less escaped before I left) and the 4 guppy fry.
there was 1 surviving hawaiian palty fry in the main tank.

so a total of 17 out of 28 fry and the main reason for the loss was probably down to the fish escaping to the main tank, I feel we could have got close to 80% had we had two 3 in 1 traps.

As an added bonus on our return one of the guppies was loloknig heavily pregnant, so we did some checks on the water quality and then moved her to the 1/3 "birthing area" of the new 54 ltr tank which is spit 1/3 to 2/3 and had been planted and started prior to our departure. She proceeded to drop around 30 fry which seem to be doing very well in their new surroundings which was a far easier process and looked a lot less stressful than the breeding traps.

If anyone has any ideas on the type and final size of the catfish I would appreciate any info.

Thanks again for all the advice.

I hope my experience might be of some use to others in future.

StatMan