Clownfish Fry Raising Journal Update 05/24/12

I hope it goes nuts! Plenty of room for growth in my tank. My purple stylo and hyacinth birdsnest are growing nice and fast. Duncans are sprouting new heads by the 3's! We have a lot of ORA corals... One of our favorite acros is Joe the coral. It has a mixture of blues, purples, and greens and great polyp extension.

 

Just waiting on everything to come in. I have found two people that have pairs that are spawning regularly so once I get everything setup I will give it a go.

 

Day three and the fry are doing great! All seem fat and hunting well. Here is a pic of them.

 

Awesome congrats

 

Wooo hooo.. looks great! It's amazing how much they grow in the first week or so. It's hard to imagine they start out smaller then a flea.

 

We've been having some die off and I'm pretty sure it had to do with rotifer density again. Never fails - rotifer density in my cultures drops off the day or two after eggs hatch.

I've been doing a better job of keeping the water quality up and harvesting on a regular basis, so in hoping that in time the population will stabilize.

I have a question though. I've been keeping my five gallon buckets underneath a 13 watt 6.5k bulb for roughly 16 hours a day. This has allowed the live phyto (nannochloropsis) that I originally added to feed the rots to continue to grow and get denser. When I first noticed that the phyto was getting darker, I thought it was a win-win - possibly a self-sustaining culture as far as food goes. And finally my question... What are the disadvantages of having a setup like this? Does the dense culture of algae take up oxygen which requires more aggressive oxygenation? I'm wondering if this is the case because I was originally "boiling" the culture water with full strength air and the culture seemed to thrive. Then I remember reading that it is suggested that rotifer cultures have just enough air to have a few bubbles reach the surface at a time... But I'm assuming this is intended for cultures that aren't housing a thriving phyto culture as well. So, a few days back I turned down the air to just a few bubbles and it seems that the rots density has suffered. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

 

That's a tough call - I've never read about anyone keeping rotifers this way. Typically rots are kept without light and fed every 12 hours with the nano or phyto actually cultured in a seperate system. It seems to me that you are complicating the process by trying to maintain both in the same system.

If your phyto is off your rotifers won't multiply as well or be as an effective means of feed. Also you risk loosing both your rots and your phyto in the event of a crash.

Personally I would remove the light and culture your phyto elsewhere so you can better control how much feed the rots are gettings.

It's complicated enough trying to raise the fry without adding something else to worry about. This is why I haven't tried to culture my own phyto (yet) as it's just one more thing to worry about. I think I'd also have a hard time reproducing the results of the feed I buy online now. Rotifer feed is critical since it not only feeds the rotifers but it's the main source of nutrition for the fry. The actual rotifers carry very little if any nutritional value to the fry - it's what the rotifers consume that makes them beneficial.

 

Thanks Pickles. My phyto is culturing separate in 2 liter bottles. I've went ahead and took the light off of the rotifer cultures and replaced half of the water with fresh mixed salt water to dilute the phyto. I was doing some reading and it looks like too much phyto rises the ph to a level where rotifer reproduction is slowed - too bad. I'll probably eventually order some rotigrow plus. If/after I get a successful clutch past meta. I might experiment comparing rotifer densities and fry survival/growth rates using home grown and rotigrow plus... Just for the heck of knowing.

 

Very cool - glad you found the reference for the ph - I knew there was a reason that people don't mix the two.

I'm really curious to see what kind of results you get with your own phyto culture. I'll be watching to see if I want to get into myself. It would be great if it works out well for you - at $90 a pop the rotigrow + just goes too fast.

 

Good news and bad news. Good news is that at day 7 we still have about 20 or so fry swimming... the bad news is that they are all slowly starving to death. They are visually skinny and do not resemble peanuts with tails as well fed fry do. They also seem weak and, for the most part, just go with the flow instead of swimming with a purpose. Sad to watch. Rotifers are few and far between in the fry tank as well as in my cultures. Not sure if the fry are accepting the Otohime A, but I continue to offer it. Decided to skip BBS this time because I would rather not deal with them if I don't have to.

So, being the failure-resenting addicted hobbyist that I am, I broke down and put in an order for Rotigrow Plus and 1 million rotifers from Reed Mariculture today . They should arrive on Friday. I'll keep these rotifers and feed separate from my current cultures so that I can experiment and compare the two in the future. I'll follow Pickle's method for storage and use of the Rotigrow Plus as well as Rotifer culturing.

Also picked up a couple Seachem Ammonia Alert Badges from Petsmart.

I think I have all of the "tools of the trade" now and there is no longer any variables to blame failure on other than my own methods. We have another clutch of eggs due to hatch on Monday, which I might let go so that I can ensure the new rotifer cultures are well-established (3 days old) prior to splitting and then harvesting. That would put us at June 3rd being the next hatch worth taking a shot at.