My Fantails are going crazy! Are these eggs on the Moss Ball?

[daileene]

congratulations in advance new papa moor...

 

[Mr. Limpet]

congratulations in advance new papa moor...

Thanks! My daughter wants a tank in her room now and she wants all the babies in it lol.

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[daileene]

very nice....tell her congrats for the new future tank from daddy...

 

[Mr. Limpet]

Woke up this morning to see tiny little fishies swimming around eat algae off the mesh walls of their bassinet .

Crushed some sinking food into fine dust to help feed them, so we'll see how it goes over the next few days.

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[Trout11B]

That's awesome!! I hope my moors mate some day haha

 

[Viper]

Very awesome! Congrats!

 

[Mr. Limpet]

Thanks and since this is the first time I was able to isolate the eggs, it's kind of trial and error. But so far so good and I'll keep a log as development progresses (or fails).

Props to Jsoong for passing his experience along and with some luck my daughter may just have 2nd gen Moors in her room at some point .

Jsoong wrote-

Well, I am the "let nature do its thing" kind of breeder .... but I have no frys to show for it!

Serious breeding is an involved process, starting with parent selection, and ending with culling of young.

Goldfish will eat their eggs & frys, so if you are serious in keeping the frys, you will need to remove them to a fry tank, or at least have heavy plant cover. Typically, breeders have breeding mats (or fine leaved plants like hornwort) for the fish to lay the eggs on, then move the plants to the fry tank.

Next, you need to watch the frys develop. Any eggs that turned white is dead & need to be removed. After the frys hatched, they will need to be fed. The traditional food is "infusoria" or green water. <Basically, you have a tank sitting in a sunny area growing algae & other microscopic critters.> You can also feed crushed boiled egg yolk or finely grounded goldfish pellets.

After a week, it is time to do the first cull. Since goldfish are very much inbred, there will be lots of deformed fish ... so you need to remove all fish with bent back, deformed bodies, etc. <These will not grow to adulthood.> Then breeders do successive culls every week or 2. The bigger ones end up being feeders at the lfs. The better ones might have a chance at the $0.99 pet specials. Out of a batch of eggs, it is unusual to get more than a half dozen fine specimens.

The "let nature do its thing" school just have the fish in a big setup (usually a pond) with lots of plants & hiding places for the frys. At the end of the season, you count the fish to see if you have more than you started with. This works well if you have just commons or comets ... as they are closer to wild type & don't need as much intervention from us humans.

-

Hard to see but here's a pic with about 15-20 that escaped their containment box (bassinet as I call it ) with super fine mess no less.

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[McLumpy]

Awesome! Congrats on your babies!!

 

[needmorecowbell]

Congrats! They look like baby molly fry!, or gbr, or discus. They are cute no matter what haha.

 

[daileene]

wooohooo new babies...awesome...your daughter must be very happy

 

[Mr. Limpet]

Thanks all We're very proud.

There's about 30 or more now. Yikes!

My biggest worry is the water is good on all tests, except pH has shot up from 7.8 to 8.8. Any observations/insights welcome.

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[Mr. Limpet]

Fry update:

They've grown quite a bit (doubled?) since the last pic, so I thought I'd post another pic.

Can't tell if there's more or if there's been some die off but as Jsoong pointed out, culling is part of healthy fish down the road.

pH is still high, everything else is normal. Gonna try a PWC to resolve it. If that doesn't work I have an API water softener pillow I may put in the Aqueon filter.

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You can't see then too clearly in pics from my phone, may have to set up the macro on my Nikon D80.

 

[jsoong]

Congratulations on your babies!

Here's a good article I found on breeding:
http://www.americangoldfish.org/Articles/Goldfish Breeding.pdf

Also, the Bristol aquatic society has good info on breeding & breed characteristics and what to select for in culling. This is more for serious/commercial breeders, but I think amateurs can learn from them so we know what a show quality fish looks like. This is their breeding start page:
Breeding Goldfish
and the Moor standard:
Broadtail Moor Goldfish

 

[Mr. Limpet]

Congratulations on your babies!

Here's a good article I found on breeding:
http://www.americangoldfish.org/Articles/Goldfish%20Breeding.pdf

Also, the Bristol aquatic society has good info on breeding & breed characteristics and what to select for in culling. This is more for serious/commercial breeders, but I think amateurs can learn from them so we know what a show quality fish looks like. This is their breeding start page:
Breeding Goldfish
and the Moor standard:
Broadtail Moor Goldfish

Thanks Jsoong and for all your help. You're truly an asset to AA.

Like you say, I'm being tough on what propagates, but it seems nature is taking care of it for me (right now anyway).

My biggest issue is pH hitting the high end of API's scale at 8.8. Do you think it will be to hard on them? Can't seem to get it down with PWC.

My KH is 120mg/GH is 140. All others are 0ppm.

Thanks again!

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[jsoong]

Something is not quite right with the numbers: KH of 120 should give you a pH of 7.8, which is ideal pH for goldfish.

I can't think of anything in a tank that can increase pH without the KH. <Unless you are adding a pure base like CaO or Ca(OH)2.>

I would check the tap water's pH to see if your test kit is reading right. If you add lower pH water to the tank with pwc's & the pH is staying up, there must be something in the tank itself that is causing the pH to rise. <Is this happening in all your tanks? Maybe you have a chunk of CaO rich rock - gypsum? - in that tank... >

But if the frys are surviving & acting healthy, I wouldn't panic about the pH. This is more a mystery to be solved rather than life of death emergency.

 

[Mr. Limpet]

Something is not quite right with the numbers: KH of 120 should give you a pH of 7.8, which is ideal pH for goldfish.

I can't think of anything in a tank that can increase pH without the KH. <Unless you are adding a pure base like CaO or Ca(OH)2.>

I would check the tap water's pH to see if your test kit is reading right. If you add lower pH water to the tank with pwc's & the pH is staying up, there must be something in the tank itself that is causing the pH to rise. <Is this happening in all your tanks? Maybe you have a chunk of CaO rich rock - gypsum? - in that tank... >

But if the frys are surviving & acting healthy, I wouldn't panic about the pH. This is more a mystery to be solved rather than life of death emergency.

Got the pH to stabilize at 8.2. All I have in there is some plants (cabomba, anacharis, moss balls, hornwort) to help soak up any excess ammo/no2/no3 and a seeded filter sponge.

I have an Aqueon filter and heater to keep things clean/stable. It's a clean plactic tub I've used before. The only thing I can think of is I have a 17w 6700K light that was resting right on top of the open aqua-tub to keeps the plants healthy. So I tilted it a bit to keep the intensity down.

I see a lot of the die of in the far corner from everything, but there's still 20 - 30 alive in the bassinet and most of the die off is outside it. Been taking sinking food and crushing it up to feed them once a day and I see some algae build up that they seem to eat too.

My pH is normally 7.6 - 7.8 in my DT and tap comes out at 7.8 - 8.0 and no calcium of any kind in the aqua-tub. Did some cleanup/plant removal and rearanged it, so we'll see. If they make it great, if they don't at least I'm learning some thing .

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[jsoong]

I don't know why the pH is rising ... plants or light shouldn't be doing that ... but if it is stabilizing, then all is well.

You might want to feed more often - sites & books I read said to feed frys 3x a days.

Cheering for your little guys.

 

[Mr. Limpet]

I don't know why the pH is rising ... plants or light shouldn't be doing that ... but if it is stabilizing, then all is well.

You might want to feed more often - sites & books I read said to feed frys 3x a days.

Cheering for your little guys.

Thanks Jsoong, I'll feed them more.

Just heard it was easy to over feed them to where they'll eat themselves to death, plus I can see them going after some plants and algae.

They seem active and the die off was in a kinda stagnant area, because they may have been trying to get away from the filter output and that's fixed now.

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[jsoong]

I am not sure they will eat themselves to death ... more a case of too much food polluting the water & causing problems.

It is not so much the amount as frequency that is important. You would feed sparingly so all food is eaten within a minute or 2. However, goldfish has short gut, so don't really store anything in their stomach. anything they eat is basically out the other end within an hour. Frys have very little energy store in the body when the yolk sac is used up, so they need more frequent feedings to maintain energy levels. What I read is that there is better survival & faster growth if feeding is more frequent.

Now having algae & stuff in the tank is a good thing. <That is the traditional infusoria idea ... have a source of living food in the tank at all times.> That should improve the survival rate.

 

[Mr. Limpet]

I am not sure they will eat themselves to death ... more a case of too much food polluting the water & causing problems.

It is not so much the amount as frequency that is important. You would feed sparingly so all food is eaten within a minute or 2. However, goldfish has short gut, so don't really store anything in their stomach. anything they eat is basically out the other end within an hour. Frys have very little energy store in the body when the yolk sac is used up, so they need more frequent feedings to maintain energy levels. What I read is that there is better survival & faster growth if feeding is more frequent.

Now having algae & stuff in the tank is a good thing. <That is the traditional infusoria idea ... have a source of living food in the tank at all times.> That should improve the survival rate.

They seem to be doing good zipping around, but not a lot growth. All water tests are good and plants (thinned down) seem to be helping (filter too). There's still about 20 left, so we'll see how they do .

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