Heros sp. 'Curare' - potentially the real Heros severus

ryansmith83

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It's right at two weeks since the first spawn hatched and the pair now has wrigglers from the second spawn. They laid them on the same flowerpot as last time, at the far end of the tank, but have decided to dig a pit for the fry in the dead center of the tank. This is causing a real problem for the unpaired fish in the tank because the male is constantly beating up any fish who tries to swim anywhere. I wish they would have left them on the far end.









And a video. I try to move closer a few seconds in and you can see the little mass of wrigglers at the bottom left of the frame, at the base of the flowerpot.


Excuse the cull angelfish. He's my crash test dummy for quarantine. He apparently thinks he's pretty (even though he's not) because he always gets right up in the camera. Funny thing is that he's invisible to the severums. He can swim right up to their spawn and they totally ignore him. They only chase off other severums and the male Krobia.
 

ryansmith83

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The second batch of fry went free-swimming today. There were way more wrigglers than free swimmers, but I think it's because the pair put them in pits in the sand and my bristlenose plecos snacked on them when the pair wasn't looking.

I ended up setting up a second tank for the non-paired severums and moved them out of the 210 because the pair was beating them up pretty badly. Lots of missing scales and split fins. So now I have the pair alone in a 210 with just a few ancistrus. We'll see if any of them make it. Between the plecos and the overflows, the numbers may drop pretty fast.

 

ryansmith83

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Well, everything that could go wrong with my first batch of 'Curare' fry, did. I made the hard decision today to cull all 200+ of them. They were almost 1".

First a new order of BBS that I received was bad, and wouldn't hatch. It took a few days to get a replacement. In the meantime I tried frozen BBS, ground pellets, ground FDBW, shaved bloodworms -- and nothing. The fry spit it all out and refused to eat. By the time I got them back on regular hatching BBS they'd probably missed a few crucial days of growth.

Then I noticed they were dark and sluggish, and found that my heater had stopped working. The tank was in the low 70s. It took a few days to bring them back up to 82F. It was a brand new heater right out of the box. Of course out of the six new heaters I ordered, that's the one that chose to die.

Things seemed back on track until I noticed they were flashing and scratching. It got progressively worse over the past few days. It looks like gill flukes. Now I'll have to treat the parents and start over. I ran the adults through a number of treatments when I first imported them but the Prazi and/or formalin for flukes is the one thing I didn't do. Now it's coming back to haunt me.

Oh well, at least I have a summer project. Better to make sure they're healthy and growing well than try to sell sub-par fry. I'm still feeling pretty gutted, though.
 

mrrobxc

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Sorry to hear about the loss. Ryan, I have to hand it to you. I never cared for the SA Heroine cichlids until I started following your threads. I now have 4 species of SA Heroines. The fact that you have an actively breeding pair of these new severums has my head spinning.

Good luck with the future spawns and please include me in the list of buyers for the fry.
 
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The Red Severum

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I am patiently waiting for you to get these fry up and running! These fish are stunning and I will be first in line to buy!

Sorry about the issues you are having, keep up with it, you are getting close! Reminds me of the issues I had breeding wild synodontis and eventually could not stop them from breeding!
 
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ryansmith83

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Sorry to hear about the loss. Ryan, I have to hand it to you. I never cared for the SA Heroine cichlids until I started following your threads. I now have 4 species of SA Heroines. The fact that you have an actively breeding pair of these new severums has my head spinning.

Good luck with the future spawns and please include me in the list of buyers for the fry.
The Heros are my favorite. I know they get overshadowed by the showier, more aggressive stuff like umbee and festae, but I've kept severums since I was a kid and I always get drawn back to them. They're colorful, they greet me at the tank like "wet pets," they make great parents, and they're usually pretty easy to mix with other fish in community setups. They really are one of the most versatile cichlids in that respect.

We'll have more spawns soon. But first I need to run the parents through formalin and clean up any flukes to prevent this in the future.
 
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Woefulrelic

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Hardest part is getting then to breed reliably and you've got that down. Once you fix up these issues you will have a lot of success I'd bet.
 
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