Moved eggs

[aarhud]

Today I noticed my female A. baenschi attacking her now one month old fry. I quickly netted her and the male out and began looking in the caves. Sure enough, there was a pretty small group of eggs in a piece of 1/2" pvc. I moved the pvc piece along with the parents. In the past I have had the female resume care, hoping it works out again!

Maybe I am just lazy, but this has happened to me on more than one occasion. Do any of you have any tips and tricks to salvage the spawn? Excluding artificially hatching/raising the fry.

 

[aarhud]

The female seemed to be guarding the spawn for about an hour or two. But now she has returned to normal coloration and is ignoring the eggs. Oh well, I'm sure they will spawn again in another few weeks.

 

[regani]

I usually remove the fry when they are 2-3 weeks old by siphoning them out. By that time they are robust enough not to suffer too much from the transfer. At this stage they are still young enough that they usually stick together and close to the mother which makes it easy to get most of them in the first attempt. Then just continue every now and the over the next few days to get the rest.
If I leave the older generation in (when I am not interested in the fry) the female does start to kill the older ones off when she lays eggs again, but with a properly decorated tank I still get quite a few survivors that I remove when the next big tank cleanup is due.
If they are as close together as in your case the older ones are also not really big enough to eat the new fry so you won't loose any of those.

 

[aarhud]

Hi Regani,

I tried siphoning them initially, but I only had airline tubing and they are too large to go through (Found that out the hard way). I'll siphon out the next batch at the 2-3 week old mark as I am sure they are easier to raise in a smaller tank. I'm nervous about netting them out.

I have bred a lot of fish, but I never raise the fry. Hoping to change that with this batch of baenschi.

 

[regani]

Yep, airline is definitely too small. Just get a piece of of larger tubing from a hardware store. I use 13mm or 16mm clear flexible tubing