pond fry - danios or white cloud mountain minnow?

[CrisCar]

Good afternoon!

I have a small pond with goldfish, leopard danios, a couple old zebra danios, and golden white cloud mountain minnows (it's not overstocked, don't worry, I'm very mindful of this and get excellent ponding advice in another forum when needed). I have some fry that are clearly not goldfish fry, but also don't really look like the images I've found of danio or golden WCMM fry either, so I'm not sure if it's just the color differences/enrichment from the pond environment or if one of my species has bred a color variant. The fry range from newborn to 3/4" in length and even at that size I still cannot tell which species they are. They are black with a single iridescent spot behind the head when they are very small, and this becomes an iridescent line along the dorsum as they get a bit bigger, but otherwise they still appear to be largely black. I haven't tried to net one since they are still quite small and very fast. Behavior wise, they act more like my danios, but it's only my WCMM that have a iridescent dorsal streak, so confused. Any ideas?

 

[Autumnsky]

Let me look again at my WCMMs I got them as tiny wisps rescued out of someones tank before the other fish ate them, though I believe they showed a bit of red on the body even at a tiny size.

I don't think they had a dot on them. It's been awhile.

Very fun to find babies though. The feeding would be similar either way. Have you had baby GF before/ experience in feeding the little tiny fry?

 

[CrisCar]

[QUOTE}

Very fun to find babies though. The feeding would be similar either way. Have you had baby GF before/ experience in feeding the little tiny fry?[/QUOTE]

These are pond fish, so they don't require any special feeding, there is plenty of varied food sources in the pond to support fry, and enough predators to make sure I only end up with a handful instead of 400 fish I have no place to put

Speaking of baby GF, I did raise some in an aquarium this year on accident. I scooped up a single newborn fry unintentionally when I grabbed a water sample and felt bad putting him back to likely get eaten so I put him in a little tupperware with a little hornwort, and he survived and thrived for a week or so in there, so I then moved him to a one gallon tank with a sponge filter and grabbed another piece of hornwort for the 1 gallon, only apparently that one had goldfish eggs from a second spawning I failed to notice because then there were 10 fry instead of just one, and so I ended up raising them in a 10 gallon and feeding them BBS initially until they were about 1 inch and then I returned them to the pond. But I really don't have room for that many goldfish so will be rehoming some in the spring.

 

[Autumnsky]

Cute story about the little unexpected fry!

It seems the GF like to put eggs on the plants which get moved out of the ponds/ tanks. I have heard that story several times.

There are no pics of the tiny WCMM I can find. It has been a couple years.

The video on YT
Zebra Danios from Birth to Young Adults
to me didn't really look like your pics

and in another titled
white cloud mountain minnows fry
it seems they look much more like your little fry

 

[CrisCar]

Cute story about the little unexpected fry!

The video on YT
Zebra Danios from Birth to Young Adults
to me didn't really look like your pics

and in another titled
white cloud mountain minnows fry
it seems they look much more like your little fry

THanks for the video! It's interesting to see since I don't have the regular color variant WCMM, but the golden WCMM (they are bright golden orange with red fins, not a hint of darkness anywhere), and even with his regular variant they look like a clearish tan color to me, not black. Plus, if these are really WCMM they are 3/4 of adult size the largest ones and still haven't changed to a color pattern that matches either my golden adults or the regular WCMM. Behaviorally, I would say these fry seem a lot less shy than my other WCMM, more like danios in that respect, but they have that reflective dorsal stripe of the WCMM, so who knows. Either way, fortunately they are such small fish that it doesn't matter much to the pond how much they breed. I had previously read that it was "impossible" for WCMM to successfully breed until they are in a single species tank, so would be happy to prove that wrong. I guess only time will tell!

 

[Autumnsky]

Maybe offspring from Golden can have common color. IDNK.

But that strip would be another reason I would think WCMM.

It will be so exciting to see what they are!!!