So thought i’d do a bit of a diary of my fry development.
Firstly I never really planned any of this, so its all been thrown together.
My fish are in a temporary swimming pool while were undertaking the rebuild, they had been chasing for a couple of days so i put the brushes in the water, they kept trying but they never managed to get any eggs in the brushes, they all just ended up on the bottom of the pond and they just scoffed the lot!
While cleaning the filters I decided I would try hand stripping the eggs from the clearly egg bound females, I’d watched various videos and read about it in the past so had a basic idea what to do. So I anethetised the two females that were being chased, and also selected two males (a large chagoi and kohaku). These were sedated in seperate bowls, i then lifted out the first female, dried her off (its essential to not get water on the eggs as they start to swell and be very sticky), gently squeezed abdomen, very little happened. About 10 eggs came out, I tried a couple more times but gave up as i didnt want to damage her.
Second fish, as soon as I was drying her eggs were going everywhere. This time stripping was easy and I had a little pot of eggs ready.
I then did the same with the male and dripped the milt straight into the eggs, gave them a mix, added a little pond water left them for a minute to swell then added to the brushes that I’d put in a water butt.
So the fertilisation was 02/06/12, two days later I added Methylene Blue – I used this to stop fungas destroying good eggs. Commonly Malachite green is used but instead I used MB as it worked well with my discus (tropical fish) fry and didnt seem to be poisionous to the young like malachite can be.
The temperature then dropped last week so hatching took a few days, and as the water was blue it was hard to see much.
But I think they started to hatch about 07/06/12, lots of little fry by 10/06/12.
I have changed about 40litres of water every couple of days. This has been replaced with water from other water butts and tap (filtered through dechlorinator) when I did a 50% change to dilute some of the blue!