I'm with you and doing it for that reason. I keep my O's on a varied diet and I'm adding Con's to it just to variy that much more.Pharaoh;2161105; said:
Convict Breeding plan
- Thread starter CichlaRyan
- Start date
I used to breed angelfish. Lots of angelfish. It was super easy to do. The hardest part was setting up the brine shrimp hatcheries every day or two.
The same techniques should be applicable to convicts, except I don't think the convict fry will every really need live BBS. Some pulverized flake is ok but I have also had good luck with boiled egg yolks, and earlier on I used the commercial product "liquifry" which both seem to help with faster growth rates.
I would set up each male/female pair in a bare 20 gallon "high" tank. No tank decorations except a clay flowerpot in each tank. The fish will almost always lay their eggs on the pot. I used HOB filters on the breeder tanks for awhile but then switched to sponge filters which are much safer to use when there are fry about.
I'd let the parents hatch the eggs but once the fry were free swimming and had burned up their yolk sacs, I'd net them out and put them in a 1 gallon pickle jar.
But this jar had a twist!!
The jar was itself a giant sponge filter. The lid was replaced with a hunk of foam that fit snugly in top. A plug of foam was removed, just big enough to squeeze in a small piece of pvc pipe as a lift tube. The bottom end of the lift tube had some holes drilled into the side and a hunk of foam stuffed up in it. A small air stone was dropped into the pvc pipe to generate the suction through the tube.
There was a second slot cut into the foam "lid" to the jar, just big enough to get the narrow tip of a turkey baster in there to inject fresh live BBS.
The whole jar was submerged in a larger tank, like a 55 gallon aquarium or a 90 gallon aquarium. When the fry were big enough to eat flake, they were released from the jar into the main tank. The 1 gallon jars were great because in a small body of water the fry have an easier time of hunting the BBS. But also each jar served as a huge sponge filter for the bigger growout tank.
The other secret to success with hydrogen peroxide. A tablespoon per day in every 20 gallon breeder tank the moment that the eggs were laid until the day that the fry were moved to the jars. This had an OUTSTANDING impact on mortality rates, so much so that I stopped thinking of angelfish fry as "fragile". The fungus levels went down incredibly with H2O2 compared to other more traditional methods.
Using this method, my breeders were laying eggs every 2-3 weeks like clockwork. I spent a lot of time running around to pet stores who eagerly purchased my better fish. I did cull heavily for quality.
All of this is probably a bit much for having some live feeders around for your fish. Dedicating so much tank space and so many hours into a species that I didn't even care much about sort of burned me out on aquariums for awhile such that when I moved it took me 3 years to set up a tank again (I've been keeping fish for around 30 years, minus those three that I took as a hiatus)
The same techniques should be applicable to convicts, except I don't think the convict fry will every really need live BBS. Some pulverized flake is ok but I have also had good luck with boiled egg yolks, and earlier on I used the commercial product "liquifry" which both seem to help with faster growth rates.
I would set up each male/female pair in a bare 20 gallon "high" tank. No tank decorations except a clay flowerpot in each tank. The fish will almost always lay their eggs on the pot. I used HOB filters on the breeder tanks for awhile but then switched to sponge filters which are much safer to use when there are fry about.
I'd let the parents hatch the eggs but once the fry were free swimming and had burned up their yolk sacs, I'd net them out and put them in a 1 gallon pickle jar.
But this jar had a twist!!
The jar was itself a giant sponge filter. The lid was replaced with a hunk of foam that fit snugly in top. A plug of foam was removed, just big enough to squeeze in a small piece of pvc pipe as a lift tube. The bottom end of the lift tube had some holes drilled into the side and a hunk of foam stuffed up in it. A small air stone was dropped into the pvc pipe to generate the suction through the tube.
There was a second slot cut into the foam "lid" to the jar, just big enough to get the narrow tip of a turkey baster in there to inject fresh live BBS.
The whole jar was submerged in a larger tank, like a 55 gallon aquarium or a 90 gallon aquarium. When the fry were big enough to eat flake, they were released from the jar into the main tank. The 1 gallon jars were great because in a small body of water the fry have an easier time of hunting the BBS. But also each jar served as a huge sponge filter for the bigger growout tank.
The other secret to success with hydrogen peroxide. A tablespoon per day in every 20 gallon breeder tank the moment that the eggs were laid until the day that the fry were moved to the jars. This had an OUTSTANDING impact on mortality rates, so much so that I stopped thinking of angelfish fry as "fragile". The fungus levels went down incredibly with H2O2 compared to other more traditional methods.
Using this method, my breeders were laying eggs every 2-3 weeks like clockwork. I spent a lot of time running around to pet stores who eagerly purchased my better fish. I did cull heavily for quality.
All of this is probably a bit much for having some live feeders around for your fish. Dedicating so much tank space and so many hours into a species that I didn't even care much about sort of burned me out on aquariums for awhile such that when I moved it took me 3 years to set up a tank again (I've been keeping fish for around 30 years, minus those three that I took as a hiatus)
