Question Extravaganza

[Bilbo]

I have read a lot recently about different theories and wanted advice from the expert audience. I have never kept fish for any other reason than to enjoy keeping them but I need to start covering costs due to a major financial issue recently. Or risk loosing most if not all of the tanks.

I cannot afford a RO unit so I use rainwater stored in a 250ltr bucket and filtered with a normal canister filter for 48hrs before I use it.
My water is very soft and has a pH of 5.5ish.

Teabags (either plain or Indian Almond) Good idea or not for enticing breeding?

DIY backwater. How do I make this? Boiling peat or dead oak leaves (which is best) and is it worth doing?

For breeding tanks bare bottom or sand?

What do people do here to make there fish look so good? Mine look a little washed out by comparison. Do people add iron to the water or what additives are used in the food if any and have we settled on the ultimate apisto recipe? For fast growth, conditioning and enhanced colouration.

I feed occasional grated beef heart, white worms twice a week, Daphnia once a week, Good flake every night, Decapsulated Brine shrimp occasionally and grindal worms every 2nd day. Being summer here I am also collecting mossie larvae on the weekends too.

I have 5 different apistos but specifically I am talking about bitaeniata and triple red x F1 cockatoos

 

[tjudy]

Hmmm... lots of questions here.

The number one piece of advice that I can give anyone wanting to breed fish for profit is... don't. At least not with apistos. Maybe angelfish. But the frequency of spawns, sex ratios and spawn sizes with apistos are too inconsistant to be able to bank on income when you need it. The few (very few) people who are successful at it are usually working with a LOT of pairs, so the frequency of success is greater, but the percentage of success is the same.

As too you rother questions...

Rainwater is awesome... so long as you have enough of it. I would filter it with carbon first, then test water parameters. It should have nothing in it. I would increase the KH to 2 in order to buffer the pH.

I have started usinbg oak leaves over catappa. One... oak leaves are free. Two... oak leaves last a LONG time without falling apart. I also like the very dark tannins released by the oak leaves. In my ten gallons turned end out it is hard to see the back of the tank the tannins are so dark. I just put a few dozen leaves in the tank. Great cover for the fish too.

Food for inducing breeding... live worms, some more live worms, a little bbs is nice... and, oh yeah, more live worms. I use white worms because I can raise them here. Most people who use worms say blackworms are better. If I could get them cheaply enough and in good condition I would use black worms too.

I like sand with fine gravel mixed in to darken it. The fish like to dig.

 

[Mike Wise]

I think that your fish look a little pale because they are under artificial light. Look at them when sunlight strikes them in a tank. They look as metallic as the do in the wild. A flash on a camera simulates sunlight, so the colors show better than under tank lights.

Making blackwater: I use sphagnum peat. We have few oaks (and no catappas

) in the Rocky Mountain West, so peat is cheaper & easier to find. I have giant homemade 20X16"/50X40cm bags that I put peat in. I weight them down with large rocks over undergravel filter plates and let the water filtler through it. Water can range from slightly acid and pale amber to very acid and dark, depending on how long I cycle the water.

 

[jose_vogel]

Milke, I didn´t know that you use undergravel filter.

Do you use them in all of your tanks?

 

[dw1305]

Under Gravel Filter plates

Hi Jose,
I should leave Mike to reply, but I think he just uses the ugf plates to prepare the water, rather than in the tank.

I've used a cotton pillow case, 3/4 filled with peat, tied up and left in a butt of rain water (I got this technique via "Microman"), it's a bit like a giant tea bag.

The peat fibre stays in the pillow case and you can draw the "peaty" water off through the water butt tap as you need it. The water butt I used was connected to the down pipe, so provided a continual source of peaty water, although the water gets less tannin stained over time (until you need a new batch of peat).

Only disadvantage is that it takes several weeks to get really tannin stained water, even with the occasional stir around, and I expect the advantage of Mike's method is that it is a bit quicker.

cheers Darrel

 

[Mike Wise]

Milke, I didn´t know that you use undergravel filter.

Do you use them in all of your tanks?

Darrel is correct. I only use the UGF in my tubs to make blackwater. It works the same way that Darrel's & Mark's pillow case works except it actively draws water through the bag of peat - just like a UGF draws water through gravel to filter a tank.

In my aquaria, I only use air-driven sponge filters.

 

[Gillie]

I never thought about using the ugf itself, I took the ugf from an old cheapo 5 gallon acrylic and made a 12x6 inch box filter and made pouches to fit nicely inside.

 

[Bilbo]

Thank you everyone. It seems to me that I have got great ideas from some of the people who I have the most respect for on the forums.

I like to pillowcase idea (not sure my wife will though) and I have already swapped gravel for sand in one of my tanks.
Also collected some good leaves and just have to wait now for them to dry out.

I am about to start concentrating on Bitaeniata and thin out my fishroom a bit. Cant get hold of any male Agassizii, Panduro or Borellii after 6 months of trying so there is 3 tanks of females that I can decommision plus another with a male steelblue that I got by accident.

 

[ste12000]

I have read a lot recently about different theories and wanted advice from the expert audience. I have never kept fish for any other reason than to enjoy keeping them but I need to start covering costs due to a major financial issue recently. Or risk loosing most if not all of the tanks.

I cannot afford a RO unit so I use rainwater stored in a 250ltr bucket and filtered with a normal canister filter for 48hrs before I use it.
My water is very soft and has a pH of 5.5ish.

Teabags (either plain or Indian Almond) Good idea or not for enticing breeding?

DIY backwater. How do I make this? Boiling peat or dead oak leaves (which is best) and is it worth doing?

For breeding tanks bare bottom or sand?

What do people do here to make there fish look so good? Mine look a little washed out by comparison. Do people add iron to the water or what additives are used in the food if any and have we settled on the ultimate apisto recipe? For fast growth, conditioning and enhanced colouration.

I feed occasional grated beef heart, white worms twice a week, Daphnia once a week, Good flake every night, Decapsulated Brine shrimp occasionally and grindal worms every 2nd day. Being summer here I am also collecting mossie larvae on the weekends too.

I have 5 different apistos but specifically I am talking about bitaeniata and triple red x F1 cockatoos

Wow that is a lot of questions... Firstly with good soft water i simply use wood and oak leaves to create the nessesary tannin rich water.

Sand substrate is prefered, firstly most gravels on the market will raise your hardness, i found this out first hand in my first year of seriously breeding dwarfs, sand(not marine!!) is inert and provides the Apistogramma with the ideal sized substrate for blocking up the cave entrance when they spawn.. I have had apistogramma spawn in bare quarantene and growout tanks and at the minute i have wild A.baenschi that spawned and has brought out 60 fry in a tiny 18x10x10 bare bottomed quarantene tank!! Sand will always be my first choice for breeding setups and all my breeding tanks are heavily decorated with sand, wood and leaves..

I think any Apistogramma kept in the right conditions will look great, i have rarely seen any that can be described as washed out and mine sparkle like a new penny!! My main feed is freshly hatched baby brine shrimp, all fish in my fishroom get this as often as i can feed them, usually around 6-10 small feedings per day, they also get grindle worm, whiteworm and microworm on a regular basis...

Goodluck with your breeding and im sure you will be able to cover costs using the very popular A.cacatuoides...

 

[dw1305]

colour

Steve said,
......i have rarely seen any that can be described as washed out and mine sparkle like a new penny!!....

Hi Bilbo, just a thought but I believe that feeding with copepods (usually Cyclops or "cyclopeeze") causes more intense colour in cichlids. My fish are also colourful, and get quite a lot of Cyclops as a "by-catch" from feeding them Daphnia (which apparently don't have the same effect). I'm not sure about BBS, but they may well have the same effect.

The compound responsible are "carotenoids" (they also make carrots orange), and a lot of granular foods claim to be rich in them.
I believe the "shrimp/peas/spirulina" mix favoured by Ad Konings etc. is rich in carotenoids from both the shrimp and their (the carotenoids) original source the "algae" (cyanobacteria in this case). Source for this may may have been "Back to Nature guide to the Cichlids of Lake Tanganyika", but I haven't got it to hand.

I think Microman had some spectacularly coloured Apistogramma eunotus a while ago who's colour he partially attributed to their feeding, although again I expect somebody else will be able to give you a much more complete answer.

cheers Darrel

 

[dw1305]

Fish colour - Scientific paper

Hi all,
Last one before Christmas, a search on "Google Scholar" for "aquaculture and carotenoids" brings up an awful lot of papers, caretonoids apparently keep your salmon fillets, farmed prawns and Flamingo's pink, as well as your cichlids colourful. Astaxanthin is apparently the "wonder" chemical. TA aquaculture sell "Red crumb" (in the UK) which is "rich in Astaxanthin", and have quite a lot about it on their web site (I've never used it so I can't comment on it's efficiency).
cheers Darrel

 

[ed seeley]

Hi all,
Last one before Christmas, a search on "Google Scholar" for "aquaculture and carotenoids" brings up an awful lot of papers, caretonoids apparently keep your salmon fillets, farmed prawns and Flamingo's pink, as well as your cichlids colourful. Astaxanthin is apparently the "wonder" chemical. TA aquaculture sell "Red crumb" (in the UK) which is "rich in Astaxanthin", and have quite a lot about it on their web site (I've never used it so I can't comment on it's efficiency).
cheers Darrel

I have used the crumb food from Ta Aquaculture and it's amazing food. As to whether it improves the colour I am not the best to say being colour blind and having fed this food for a few years now, but I haven't known a sinlge fish - even wild fish and killies - that don't eat it with relish. Tim also sells Astaxanthin powder that can be mixed with other foods too.

 

[Bilbo]

Thanks everyone. Got some really good answers here and a lot to look in to.

I did an experiment with the tank water I have been using. Its a 1000ltr drum coming off the roof with a sponge and mesh filter to stop leaves and bugs getting in. It measures pH 6 and very soft but there is something wrong with it because even daphnia die within a few hours of going into it and I lost 100% of the rams 7 or 8 batches in a row.
I changed to carbon and peat filtered tap water and straight away I had a big change in adult colours and young fry survival rates.
To bad I didn’t pick this up before.

 

[Mike Wise]

If you use rainwater from a roof, it is best to not use it until the rainwater has washed pollutants out of the atmosphere and it has flushed debris off the roof - about 15 minutes should do. Then aerate the holding vat for a day while circulating the water though activated carbon to remove residual dissolved pollutants.

 

[Gillie]

I started using run off from my roof over the summer, it's probably the quickest way to accumulate large quantities of soft water. We had a storm in july that had 4 barrels over flowing after about 15 minutes, too bad it gets used up almost as quickly.