Pregnant Six Line Wrasse

WOW!!!!! We're anxiously awaiting pictures. Document all activity, what, if anything, that might has attributed to this. Call your local newspaper, would be great to get a story running on this. Best of luck to you.

Sue

 

I think they may have been duped and think they are in the sea - you said the tank was big and lowly populated. Might be why they have bred.

 

Very interesting. Please post pics.

 

Pregnant Six Line Wrasse lay eggs

The Six Line layed eggs, three times over a course of 4 days. I have some pictures but apologize as I have not figured out how to get an auto focus camera to see past the glass. My eyes are definitely not good enough for a manual focus.

We began to watch the courting behaviour about two weeks ago. They would swim together through tunnels and up to the surface and down to the bottom. Occassionally they would line up side by side and display their fins. Four days ago we notice the female appeared to have a bloated belly and suspected she was pregnant. We did not know whether to expect eggs, eggs in mucus or fry. The answer is free eggs. From what we can find this may be the first recorded mating and laying of eggs by the Six Line Wrasse.

The day of the first laying the pair would swim fairly quickly all over the tank. A pair of YT blue Damsels were following closely which gave us a clue someting was about to happen. The Wrasse began to swim vertically up and down in the tank corners, then suddenly dove to their cave where an eruption of what looked like micro bubbles appeared. The Damsels were immediately on them but there must have been hundreds of eggs. We are sure they did not get them all. This has happened twice more.

To try and collect eggs that the Damsels did not get we have removed all foam filters as well as the water in cannisters. These are now in 5 gallon buckets containing water from a partial water change. Finding the eggs is nearly impossible as they are so small but if they hatch we should be able to see the fry in the bucket. We have also planted some of the filter water in a water tray with live rock. Both refugiums (did I spell that right?) have a lot of loose red algea that we added. When and if the eggs hatch we will add finely ground marine flakes.

The Wrasse sleep together in an extremely small hole in the LR. The hole is no more than 12 mm and about 18 mm deep. They go in head first and turn around, both sleeping facing out. We suspect they may have a stash of eggs in this hole but do not want to disturb it by poking around.

Any suggestions are very much welcome. Here are some pictures.

Coral shrimp looking for eggs

Normal six line female

Pregnant six line female

Pregnant six line from side

Pregnant six line from rear

Hundeds of tiny eggs (may not be visible online)

 

looks awesome, it's a small chance, but maybe some will survive, it seems that you are doing everything that you can.

 

Very cool!

 

Congrats!!

 

i guess you could try to raise them the same way as clowns

 

She laid again last night. That is four times in 5 days. I also took some videos but not sure how those get posted. I do not have a YouTube account.

How do they raise clowns (maybe just a quick summary)? Also, any guesses as to how long the eggs should take to hatch?

 

Please!!!

If you haven't already please be sure and post this on marinebreeder.org, Those guys can really help out. Also if you are uninterested in the work to raise them, someone might give you a pretty penny for them to actually try to bring them through to Juveniles.