fry food

[brad]

Instead of taking the "first food for curviceps" thread too far off course, I'm starting my own fry food thread.

Has anyone used golden pearls with any success?

I've got a kid on the way and I'm not sure I'm going be able to keep going with all these live foods. I haven't been able to find APR near me either.

 

[Graham]

Although I didn't diligently keep at it, I've tried 2 sizes of GPs (both smaller than BBS-size) with no apparent feeding response from Apisto fry. With the ease of microworm culturing and BBS hatching, I didn't have the desire to keep trying.

 

[brad]

I've been reading scattered comments about "better than brine".

http://www.aquabid.com/cgi-bin/auction/auction.cgi?foodo&1179192537

and fairy shrimp eggs.

Anybody tried this stuff out?

 

[mk_ultra]

I use the 50 micron GP on my old world cichlids with great success. My cacs just spawned a few days ago and I think I may have lost the fry to this. All my tanks are filtered with sponges and I think the disturbance helps disseminate they GP throughout the tank. THis is the only tank with a power filter and it does not do a well enough job. To sum it up... I should have gone with the microworm culture, esp. since it's next to the tank.

 

[dhm325]

It depends on the genus. I have used Golden Pearls for years with Pelvicachromis fry. Actually, I use a mixture of 300 micron GP, decapsulated brine shrimp eggs and freeze died cyclops. However, when I tried using the 50-100 micron size on Hemichromis fry (I did not use a mixture, the other types are too large for new born fry of this genus), I lost the spawn. I had the same result with Rams. In both cases, I had to switch to micro worms and then live bbs.

I have also tried this mixtrue with Crenicichla Regani fry but I have found that I wind up with more fry when I start them out with lives bbs.

I did try the same mixture that I use with Pelvicachromis on Apistogramma McMasteri and had excellent results. However, my experience with Apistramma is limited to that one species, which has been tank raized for many generations. I don't know how F1 fry would react.

 

[tjudy]

One of the problems with Golden Pearls and other prepared fry foods, when feeding apistos and most other SA dwarf cichlids, is that the fry are attuned to moving food. They can be trained to take the prepared foods by mixing it with live food and feeding it together. Once the live foods start the fish eatign they will snap up other particles in the vicinity. THis is another reason to try to remove as many brine cysts and shells from hatch brine as possible. The fry will eat them in the presence of live brine.

The easiest live food for very small fry IME is vinegar eels. I have two cultures going at all times. In fact, the bottles have been producing eels for almost two years with a 50% media change and new apple slices once about 6 months ago. I only feed off them when I need food that small... usually for killies and characin/barb/cyprinid/rainbow fry.

I culture them in broad-based bottles with long necks (Jack Daniels bottles to be specific... getting the empty bottle was worth the effort). I use a mixture of 2/3 apple vinegar and distilled water and fill the bottles up to the point where the bottle starts to narrow into the neck. I add 1/2 of a small apple sliced to fit through the neck of the bottle. After inoculating the culture the eels will be ready to harvest in about a month. I plug with a wad of filter floss, and keep the bottles on a top shelf in the fish room. No direct light needed.

To harvest I pour media from one bottle into the other until it is full to just the point where the bottle gets very narrow, leaving the neck empty. I stuff another floss plug into the neck until about 1/2 the floss is in the media, then pour clean water into the neck over the floss plug. Overnight the eels will swim through the plug to get to the higher oxygen concentration in the clean water. To feed I just use a gropper pipette to pull worms and transfer to the tank. I just leave the plug in the culture and harvest, adding more clean water over the plug when necesary, for a week. Then I change to the other culture if I need more eels. Vinegar eels live a long time in clean water. So a big feeding in the morning will usually mean that there is food for the fry all day long. Filters will pull the worms out of the water column, so I still feed twice a day.

Vinegar eels are not as nutritious as microworms or bbs (with bbs being the best), but they are useful for fry that are too small for those other foods, or for when live food is needed but the other foods are not available. Since the cultures are long lasting and rarely go bad, they are easy to have on hand with almost no effort.

 

[brad]

What about the vinegar eels tendency to stay at the top of the water colomn (part of their appeal to betts breeders)

I have 2 cultures going for about 3 months now and as far as culturing goes, these are perfect for me. Will apisto fry find them though, especially if the eels go back up to the top?

 

[beleg]

I dont know why but my agassizi fry didn't show interest in microworms at all for the first few days of feeding.. They only looked interested in bbs but hardly eating it. After a few days they start to take microworms as well as bbs.. Is this natural?

Another very commonly used first food for fry here is the yellow of the egg, hard boiled, smashed in water. Then its let to settle for a minute or two. The water will then be taken with a pipette and fed to the fry. Not the best method and easily fouls the water though.

 

[tjudy]

Vinegar eels will be swept by the current. So long as an airstone is turning the water over they will be dispersed in the tank.

 

[Reillin]

.

Try a tub of green water in a place in the garden with some sun and some shade. Inoculate this with some freshwater rotifers and once they are established, you'll only need to walk to the tub and using a 50micron filter, take a scoop, go back inside and place it into the fry tank.

Although, a mature sponge filters should suffice your fry, I think microworms is as simple as you can get.

 

[Zack Wilson]

I guess when it comes to GP, I've had mixed results as well. I've used it with a variety of dwarf fry, and for some it has worked and others not so well, but in the end I would say that the results were only satisfactory in the cases where it did.

I've used GP with kribs with great success. This species' fry tend to forage very actively over substrate surfaces, so they will usually find the food regardless of its moving.

I've also tried it on borellii, atahualpa, maulbruter, baenschi, dicrossus, as well as blue rams. Of those species the baenschi, dicrossus, and rams did fine. The rams seemed to eat them quite readily and during the first few days this was enough to get them along till they could eat bbs. I soaked the food in water first and then syringed a bunch up and squirted it as a cloud into the fry. I was able to raise spawns of 100+ fry up in this fashion. On the other hand the baenschi and dicrossus, while willing to eat it, did not have as good a result as I would have had with bbs. I tried it out on a spawn of about 80 baenschi fry and at the 40 day period I was left with about 30-40 fry. Not bad really, but not as good as I could have done with bbs. The dicrossus were similar in success rates, although it's been a while and I don't remember the actual numbers. The borellii, atahualpa, and maulbruter wouldn't even eat it and I couldn't get any spawns to grow up at all. All fry would disappear within 2-3 days--I actually had better luck with just keeping them in a dirty tank with no feedings at all. I was actually surprised about the borellii, and in fact once I got the fry to about two months I started them on pellet food and they've taken to that fine now.

I've also tried a mix of GP with decap bbs and this has worked okay for the baenschi when I tried it. If you're busy ( and I can sympathize about the kid--one 2yr old and another on the way too) I know it can be a pain constantly restarting the bbs, but IMO if you want a good fry count it's the easiest and fastest food to get going. Vinegar eels are about the only other food I've had the inclination to work with, due to it's aforementioned attributes, but I've had mixed result with my dwarfs. They're quite small so not all my fry like them/see them.