Watched a vid today by bioaquatix and he said he’s breed clowns as small as 3.5inches. Also heard a lot of the smaller ones are the ones doing the breeder.
Well you figure if they can start the breeding at such a small size hormones or not then in the wild they must to right.Bioaquatix breeds clown loaches in a controlled environment, using hormones, so I'm not sure that one can compare that to the average breeding size in nature. Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) ban the export of clown loaches above 15cm/6” to protect vital brood stocks. That’s the size at which Clowns are thought to start spawning. In Sumatra, no such ban exists.
Yeah maybe males get ready early and your right you don’t see people stripping small fish. All seem over the 6inch mark. I haven’t seen them do smaller.Not necessarily. And of course that could just be smaller males taking part, not smaller females. Typically males are smaller in stature than sexually mature females. And obviously the smaller the female, the less quantity of eggs that would be produced. You don't see any photos or vids of anyone stripping roe from a 3" clown loach.
You watched the vid that Adam posted, yes? This isn't a natural process. The hatchery workers manually strip the eggs from the female, and manually fertilize them with sperm that is milked from the males. If Bioaqutix is stating that their CL's are breeding in captivity naturally, without hormones, unless they have video documentation and I have somehow missed that over the years, I'm calling BS.
I have visited several fish farms in Indonesia which regularly breed clown loaches. Some of them are very large scale, estimation of 2 or 3 million fish per month.
I've got plenty of photos but I'm not interested in posting photos.