Breed Clownfish | Saltwater Fish

[Cyanight]

Well, today is day 6 of my maroon clown babies and I plan to feed them baby brine shrimp this evening. I fed them rotifers this morning.

My setup:
5 Gallon Eclipse hex tank
air stone
heater
top light

I do 25% water changes daily and feed them rotifers 3 times a day. I also use amquel to keep the NH3 low.

So far I have 90% success rate with very few deaths. My queen has laid another set of eggs so I plan to move the 6 day old fry to my nano cube. I understand they need an air stone but when can I use a power filter? Also does anyone feed their clowns otohime after 30 days?

Here is the queen and her eggs, hehe

ClownEggs.jpg (78.44 KiB) Viewed 1357 times

[admin]

Nice man. Beautiful picture. Congrats on the sucess. After metamorphosis they probably will be big enough that you could use a sponge filter. I would wait until they get 1/2 to 3/4 inch but just monitor them and see how they react to running a sponge filter. By 30 days I am usually feeding crushed flakes and fry powdered food. Sometimes for a treat they get cyclopeez.

[Cyanight]

I already have my 7 day old clownfish in a nanotank with a sponge filter. I don't think any of them have become trapped. I will check this evening though. I did make a stupid mistake and left my cleaning magnet in the tank.. That claimed 20 lives before I removed it. I also have a second batch of eggs that should hatch tonight or tomorrow. Here are some pics of the current batch.

This first pic is the hatching in my display tank

Clownfish Hatching

Clownfish_Hatching.jpg (41.61 KiB) Viewed 1327 times

This next picture is day 1 old.

Clownfish Day 1

Clownfish_Day1.jpg (43.46 KiB) Viewed 1327 times

Here they are at day 4.

Clownfish Day 4

Clownfish_Day4.jpg (49.47 KiB) Viewed 1327 times

[Cyanight]

Here is a closeup of day 5

Clownfish_Day_5.jpg (21.03 KiB) Viewed 1321 times

and here is a picture at Day 6. You can see their bellies are full of brine shrimp, hehe

Clownfish_Day_6b.jpg (81.7 KiB) Viewed 1321 times

[warren1]

hi Cyanight

well done on your great sucess the pitures have been great
keep up the great work

[Cyanight]

Here is some more updated pics.

MSG_Clown_Day7.jpg (87.36 KiB) Viewed 1282 times

MSG_Clown_Day9.jpg (52.11 KiB) Viewed 1283 times

[admin]

Awesome pictures you have had some good sucess it looks like. What was your process to breed clownfish? Did you use techniques similar to the ones on http://www.breedclownfish.com?

Keep the pictues coming and keep us updated.
--Scott

[Cyanight]

I followed about everything from this site. Without this site I doubt I would have had much success. I read some info on other sites and they stated to keep the clowns in darkness which I did NOT do. I kept them under light 24/7 for 2 weeks. I believe the statement from this site that "they need light to see because their vision is poor when they are young"

I also dripped DI water with a little bit of prime slowly into the fry tank. The drip was very slow, close to one drip every 2 seconds. This helped maintain the salinity and slowly added more Prime to remove ammonia and nitrate.

I do 50% water changes daily.

I do daily 30% water changes on my rotifers. This has helped my culture last so long. I also feed only Reef Nutrition Rotifer Diet. I believe this really is important because this is where the nutrients that the fry fish need to live come from. The Rotifers are just the carrier.

After 7 days I added a sponge filter that was in my sump's display tank for 3 weeks. I also used an airstone in the tank for water movement.

After 14 days I added Live Rock rouble from my refugium to the tank. I placed the rocks on top of the sponge.

Since then I have been doing daily waterchanges of 30% and continued to drip DI water with a tiny 5 drops of prime/liter of water.

This morning I saw some of my clowns starting to fight, hehe. Strange because they are only 3 weeks old.

My next step is to start feeding them something other than brine shrimp. Should I feed them Otohime, cyclops powder or prime flake food? I wondered how long I should feed them brine and when I can start weening them off live food.

I will post an update pic this evening. They are really cute to watch at this stage. Their stripes are still white though.

[Cyanight]

These are my readings in my fry tank before I placed the live rock in the tank
NH3 1.63ppm
NO3 0.99ppm

and these are my parameters after 1 week of live rock
NH3 0.28ppm
NO3 6.11ppm

All these tests were ran in a laboratory so they are more accurate than a hobby grade kit which shows 0 when actually there is 0.28 NH3 present. So you can see this is definitely an improvement from last weeks water test. I guess thats the benefit of being a chemist and working at a laboratory. I get free water test, hehe.

I'll post some more pics this evening if I can.

On a side note I noticed something strange living in my rotifer culture. It looked like a centeped and was close to 1/4 an inch long. I dont think it was a bristle worm but I should have looked at it under the microscope to be sure. Needsless to say I think my rotifer culture is doomed now

[alanna]

Great job on your fry and your pictures !:mrgreen: I found a candle fly in my rotifer culture the other day it was still alive. Not sure how he got in there as I keep a cover over it with one small hole to vent and no light. I've only added water to my 1st rotifer culture and 1 20% water change to my 2nd culture. I have lots of rotifers. I guess I'm lucky so far. I also have alot of green stuff on the bottom and on the walls of the buckets. I do have a air stone, I harvest about 10-15% a day with a coffee filter and put the water back in. I then add some rotifer diet. So far so good. I do a a batch of live babies not maroons. I haven't put in a filter yet or rock. Maybe I'll try. I've only been doing this for around a month. Keep up the good work. I love the pictures