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Thread: Clownfish Breeding Newbie

  1. #11
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    I will post some updated vids tonight.

    Currect Status: Clutch 3 hatched on Friday, March 23rd. BIGGEST catch ever. Over 200 fry! Only 1 problem. No where to put them. I have 2 tanks going, a 29G and a 10G for the babies. the 29G has the last clutch and just went through meta phase, turned orange and got 1-2 stripes so far. 10G tank has my first 2 babies and are full baby clown looking now, nice color, active, all 3 stripes. So... what do I do with 200 new babies? Well.. I had hoped they would get a long with the 2 week old babies. Turns out, not a wise idea. Lost almost all of them by yesterday. I think I had 3 remaining. So all weekend, every 15 minutes, I was sucking out half a dozen dead fry that the bigger ones kept biting. Sucks, but no biggie to me. All a BIG learning experience, so even my failures are successes to me because I learn what not to do next time.

    So today I have 30+ 2.5 week old babies, 3x 4 day old babies (if they are still alive when I get home), and the 10G tank with 2 babies that are going on 2 months now. These little guys take A LOT longer than I was expecting to grow up to "reef tank capable" size. I think I am looking at 6+ months minimum before they are big enough to go into a tank with other fish. Sunday the clowns layed another clutch of eggs, they seem to only wait 2 days after the eggs hatch before they lay new ones now. I am going to have to skip some batches though because I am not quite setup for this type of turnover, seems I would need at least 4 different tanks to put the different phases of clowns in, which I am not really wanting to do. I am always WAAAY over my limit on how many tanks I am supposed to have in my apartment (1), I have 7 now. Since this was more of a learning experience than something I wanted to do long term I don't really want to keep this going. Maybe 1 more batch. My goal is to get positive karma.. breed enough fish and give them away in order to balance out all the fish I have taken in my lifetime. I figured I have taken about 100 fish total in my 20+ years in the hobby, so my goal is to give at least 100 fish back to the hobby.

  2. #12
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    Awesome!! Thats pretty kewl. I want my clowns to start breeding, one has taken up with a goniopora coral so I hope this will encourage them a bit. I will not have a baby tank for a while so the eggs will be food for the tank until I do.
    150G. Reef/Mix
    125G. 3 Regular Oscars/1 Jack Dempsey
    75G. 20+ Africans
    40G. Fish/Reef. Algae Scrubbers on ALL my SW
    10G. SW Fish/Reef.
    10G. SW Hospital/new fish quarantine/pod breeder tank
    6 stage RO/DI system 200 GPD.

  3. #13
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    2 Clownfish 6 weeks old in 10G tank.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecom08oU9GM

    30+ clownfish 2 weeks old in 29G tank. None of the babies made it from Friday, live and learn.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT0XlQyIWkA

    Zoomed in
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91IF9Q3jg0

  4. #14

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    You have a scrubber running these tanks? Excellent job, keep up the good work!!

  5. #15
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    No scrubber on the baby clownfish tanks. That isn't even possible. A pump or overflow box would kill the babies quickly. All you can have in the tanks is a sponge filter/air pump and a heater and LOTS of cleaning/water changes, which adds up quickly. Went through a box of 200G worth of salt in just a month.

  6. #16
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    Couldn't you draw the water out, slowly, through a sponge filter into a sump or adjacent tank with the same water level, then run the scrubber on the sump? What I'm thinking is something with enough flow to suck through the sponge filter and pump that to the second tank, and the second tank would gravity drain back to the main tank. Second tank would not even have to be that big. For that matter it could be an HOB type of system with the HOB just being the reservoir for the scrubber pump and return which would mostly cycle the water in it through the scrubber and the HOB feed pump would slowly change the water in the reservoir.

  7. #17
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    The sponge filters I have can only have an airline plugged into it. If I turn the valve up all the way on the air pump the force just from the air blows the clowfish all over the tank. The flow is too strong, just with a single air line if it isn't restricted.

    Just to give you an idea how slowly things need to happen, it takes me 4 hours to change 5G of water because I have to slowly drip the water back into the tank. I tried just taking bad water out and dumping good water in (which I read not to do, but I had to try it myself) and sure enough, it caused 10 babies to die within the hour. When I slow drip water changes I don't have any deaths. They are so super sensitive at this stage to water parameter changes, even making the water "good" quickly leads to negative issues. No way a HOB filter would work for this application, even the smallest HOB filter is way to strong. Look at your pinky fingernail.. and then imagine the clownfish are smaller than that, and not developed enough to swim good. They change from the face to tail, face turns orange first, tail takes a week or 2 after the face turns orange until the tail gets the "clownfish looking tail" vs the tad pole looking tail, and that is when the 3rd stripe starts to form at the base of the tail.

    Link to sponge filters I am using. They are pretty tiny compared to the large ones I see for ponds. About 3" in diameter. The riser tube you see in the picture, that is as tall as it is.. 2" tall and 1/2 the diameter if a standard under gravel filter tube (I bought a tube thinking I could extend it to the surface, the under gravel riser tube I bought was way to big in diameter.)
    http://www.marinedepot.com/Ista_Hydr...FRITAD-vi.html

  8. #18
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    I hear what you're saying but creating a flow through an HOB using one of those super tiny new eheim compact pumps with the adjustable valve sucking through the sponge and pushing that into an HOB or a separate tank, really really slowly, and having that gravity drain or dump back into the main tank, really really slowly, I would think that would work. Even if you had an overflow in the tank and covered it with something to prevent the babies from going through it like Poret foam, and still only put a really low flow through it to a separate large water volume tank, I think you would be able to make it happen. The key is having the separate tank above or on the same level as the breeder tank so that it gravity feeds and the pump in the tank doesn't cause a siphon, and a lower reservoir tank would not work as you would have a push-pull 2 pump system and that won't work. I'll see if I can draw something up, maybe I'm missing something but I see no reason why a low-flow pump on the sponge wouldn't work.

  9. #19
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    How would you suck water out an air tubing line for the sponge filter? Only thing I can think of that is made for that purpose is an Aqualifter.

    Also, that wouldn't solve the main issue, which is a ton of food laying on the ground spoiling. That is the reason I have to do so many water changes.. the food falls to the floor and starts to get "fuzzy" like mold looking if left for more than a day.

    Food after 24 hours. Getting ready to clean it up right now. (It is all orange looking food, it gets white/moldy when it spoils)


    Edit: There is obviously an easier/cheaper method than the way I am doing it.. use MUCH SMALLER TANKS. No need for a 29G for the tiny babies, and no need for a 10G for 2 babies. I could have partitioned the 10G 3x and it would have been fine for what I am doing and I would have used 1/5th the salt so far.

  10. #20
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    LOL I hear ya there, but you do with what you can when something like this happens, right?!?!

    The sponge filter wouldn't have the water sucked through the airline. The bubbles out of the airline create updraft which pulls water through it (not telling you anything you don't already know here just explaining) so you would get rid of the airstone/line and plug a pump intake right on to the large plastic tube, then the outlet of that pump goes to the remote tank, which then drains back into the breeder tank.

    Taking your above pic into consideration, and using the aqualifter concept (didn't think of using one of those...) you could use an aqualifter to siphon off the food/waste into a filter sock in the remote tank, thereby not changing the water volume, then you pull and change the filter sock. Then the remote tank you make a huge reservoir compared to the breeder tank. Like you said, probably a 5g tank would have done the job to house the clowns, then the reservoir could be say a 40 breeder, then you could set that tank up on a constant water change system too or something like that if the scrubber wasn't enough.

    I'm trying to think of a way to reduce your need for PWCs that you need to do because you can't use a scrubber, but with a remote tank system you would and therefore no PWCs or at least less reliance on them.

    Heck I could build a one-piece tank system out of acrylic for something like this, sounds pretty cool actually...

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