Laetacara spawning

[stormhawk]

After a long hiatus from spawning fishes, I finally got myself several Laetacara specimens from C328. While I do believe the fish I own are Laetacara curviceps, others on the Apistogramma.com forums think they are probably Laetacara sp. "Bolivien", or a form closer to Laetacara dorsigera, instead of curviceps. Until their identity is known, I'll just refer to them as Laetacara sp.


Here is the male that recently spawned, guarding his clutch of eggs.


Here is the female that was part of the pair that spawned, taking over guard duty.


I moved the eggs attached to the coconut piece to this hatchery I rigged up. This was done 2 days after the pair first laid eggs. The fry had already hatched by then but still helpless and basically in the wriggler stage.


Fry in wriggler stage still consuming their egg yolk.


Close up of a single fry.

Pardon me for the occasionally blurry pictures. The front glass of my 4 ft tank has a fine carpet of brown algae, which doesn't bother me much.

I did take some videos as well:

This video shows the pair in pre-spawning behaviour. Watch the head-twitching movements.


Here you can see the male doing guard duty on his eggs. A day after I took this video some of the eggs, well most of them, turned white. Either the male is not very fertile, or the female produced low quality eggs.


This video is a close-up of the fry during the wriggler stage. You can see them wriggling furiously to the slow current I created in their mini-hatchery.

This is the 2nd time that male has spawned, with a different female. The first spawning resulted in a big cloud of fry that that did not survive past the first 3 days of free-swimming stage. Not surprising since my 4 footer is not well-planted and with Angelfish, a Dicrossus filamentosus female, a school of Cardinal tetras and 2 Stiphodon gobies and 3 other Laetacara, their chances were doomed.

I decided to move the eggs this round, so as to give any resulting fry a chance at survival. Hopefully it works. I counted 25 hatchlings and eggs on the coconut shell, but to date I can only count 10-12 of them surviving. Let's see if they'll survive to adulthood.

[benny]

Woah! Haven't lost your magic touch at all huh? Nice!

Cheers,

[mobile2007]

Wow, they really look fat and cute. How you manage to find these in c328? DId you order from them?

[stormhawk]

@Benny:

Just lucky I guess. I bought 5 and tried my luck. Good thing I had 3 males and 2 females, I think. One of them I just cannot be sure on the sex, since it has yet to display male coloration, nor the female brood dress. Oddly, my Stiphodon gobies are doing extremely well. Perhaps what this Goby guy in Japan said is true. To keep Stiphodon you basically need a mature tank with abundant algae growth.

By the way Benny, you should get these fish when they appear next at C328. Exactly the same brood care and aggression methods like the Apistogramma. Heck the male and females of this species can give ANY Apistogramma a run for their money in terms of beauty. Turquoise green sides, blue, red and gold-yellow and they even turn black during breeding.

@mobile:

They are fat and cute. When I first got them they were a little smaller. Now feeding greedily on Tetrabits. I do not give them anything else, except for the occasional frozen bloodworm or live brine shrimp whenever I drop by C328 to get miscellaneous items. This is the 2nd spawning from the first male, with a different female. As of the time of this post the fry are still with the yolk sac and wriggling a lot. I'm just hoping they'd start to be free-swimming soon. In any case I just started up my new BBS hatchery. Since they take 22-24 hours to hatch I guess it'll be just in time when the fry start being free-swimming.

I thought about making a separate nursery tank but since space is a premium now, I guess a floating hatchery works. I still got a net breeder somewhere so when they grow larger then I'll move them over for the growout stage, or raise them in another tub or something. Oh and I didn't order these from C328. A bunch of them arrived one day and I happened to drop by and saw them. Since I had kept L. curviceps a few years before, I figured why not try these again. Back then I had a pair of males so they didn't breed.

When I was at C328, another tank had this scribbling on it - Laetacara sp. "Yellow something. I forgot the final part but there was a Rio xxxx thing attached to that scribbling. In any case I doubt these were those fish. They exhibit the colors of a curviceps, yet show characteristics of dorsigera.

[benny]

By the way Benny, you should get these fish when they appear next at C328. Exactly the same brood care and aggression methods like the Apistogramma. Heck the male and females of this species can give ANY Apistogramma a run for their money in terms of beauty. Turquoise green sides, blue, red and gold-yellow and they even turn black during breeding.

I know they are beautiful. Used to have 20 in my 4 ft tank. They are extremely territorial and all gang up agains the weakest one. So one by one they peck off their weakest till there was finally only 1 left.

Cheers,

[stormhawk]

I have 5 in my 4ft tank and the aggression level is minimal since there's a lot of other fish to pick on. With 20 that is just too many since once they pair off they become very vicious. To date I found 4 surviving fry out of the lot that I fished out. If this round doesn't work I'll just move the parents to a separate breeding tank.

OT: It seems that the packets of Artemia eggs + salt mix sold by Sera are not having a good hatchrate oddly.

[mobile2007]

Hmm, which corner of C328 did you managed to find these laetiacara? Maybe next time can look for them too.

They seems to resemble certain similarity to nannacara and the ram. Like having the more interesting feature of both specimens.

For BBS eggs, you can get from c328 counter. They are selling loose portion ( a small plastic bottle) for $8. Seems to have good hatch rate from what i heard. Also, using the coarse sea salt will get better hatch rate and the bbs can live longer, based on my own experience.

[Tony]

Wow! Very fierce looking fish you have netted. Nice strong built.

Congrats to the successful spawn!

[SCOPE]

Nice breeding.... on this beautiful jewel

[stormhawk]

Sadly the 2nd spawn did not make it. The free-swimming fry somehow found an escape route out of the breeder box. I do not know how they did it but I started on a new project to make a better breeder box.

Currently the male has spawned again with one of the females. Not sure which one of the 2 that spawned with him previously but this time there's ALOT more eggs. Now I got the 3rd spawn to test my improved breeder box with.

@mobile,

I found them on the left-hand side of the store, near where you find all the gravels and food. I dropped by C328 earlier and saw the scribbling I mentioned. It was Laetacara sp. "Orangeflossen" Tucano, which is basically Laetacara fulvipinnis. My fish exhibit yellowish fins on normal coloration. They only turn dark blue during brood care or threat displays.

Regarding the BBS eggs, I did not find those vials of eggs on the counter but I'll get them somehow. At least there's a source of live Moina near where I live.

[stormhawk]

Revisiting my old thread. More fry again...



The parents did not spawn for the past 3-4 months then suddenly 2 spawns in a row. First of the 2 recent spawns did not make it for some reason, but this current pair are doing their job fantastically. This is probably the 8th time these Laetacara have spawned in my messy tank. I'm waiting for the fry to be a little more active before I siphon them out to a separate tank for raising.

[stormhawk]

Video of the parents herding their fry:



I siphoned out half of the spawn to raise them separately in a plastic tub. The parents are performing an excellent job guarding their fry.