Banggai Cardinals breeding

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0o.Kelsey.o0

Aquarium Advice Addict
Joined
Apr 14, 2009
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Saskatchewan, Canada
My cardinals have finally began breeding again, this is their second attempt. The male has had the eggs for 6 days now so hopefully he'll decide to keep them this time. If he does there should be about 25 fry let out of his mouth in about 17 more days. During this time he doesn't eat, so if he didn't get enough food before he might eat/spit out the eggs. Here is a video I took of him, it shows him adjusting the eggs in his mouth so you can see them. (time 1:36)

YouTube - Banggai Cardinal Adjusting Eggs

And a photo of him showing his largish jaw. He isn't in this photo but he loves hanging out by our long spine urchin now that he has eggs, once he lets the fry go they will need the urchin for safety.
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Alright so we took the male out of our display tank yesterday (day 18), it took awhile but he didn't spit his eggs out so we were happy. Then this morning I look and there are about 12 eggs on the bottom of the tank!! I quickly removed them and put them in a jar with a heater and bubbler, there is one that is dead for sure but the rest have since popped out of there shell and are in their wiggling stage.

This is what they look like (not my photo, got it from google)
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They cannot swim so we still have a little current on them, hopefully some survive! I also think the father still has a few in his mouth, I'm going to feed him soon and see if he eats. (if he doesn't eat it means he still has some)
 
Well sadly all of the 12 he originally spit out died, could be because they sat all night or because they were moved to a new tank. He spit out about 5 other eggs later the next day and so far three are still alive, one is even swimming around :). They are all starting to look like bangaii cardinals so that's good. They should be eating baby brine in a day or two, currently they are still living off of their yolk.
 
Update, we lost all of our baby brine due to a heater incident I believe so we then lost our oldest baby :( We currently have two that survived and are eating the new baby brine though, they look very cute! Here's a few not so great shots.

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The one looking up hasn't quite developed his swim bladder yet so he has a little bit of a jerky swim lol
 
Thats really cool, are these a lot easier to raise than the clowns?
 
I'd say yes because they can be fed live baby brine shrimp right away, I've read that clowns need to be fed live rotifers at first. The batches are a lot smaller than clowns though, usually only about 18 eggs give or take vs a clowns 500 haha.
 
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