Should I look into using MB? Also, my fish could possibly be siblings, but the place I got them from has different cory breeders they buy fish from, so I have no clue. If they are siblings, would their eggs be highly infertile or have lower hatching rates? Are corys easily inbred?
My female laid eggs in only one spot, and it took them 5-6 hours to lay around 150 eggs. Is that considered " good"?
In-breeding is generations of brothers and sisters being bred to each other. Yes, there could be higher infertility rates but there could also be higher rates of disfigured fish at normal fertility. When we were dealing with wild fish, Ma Nature
designed things to have the strongest breeders breed (usually not to a sibling) to carry forth the specie while the weaker fish just lived their lives without the chance to breed. Now that we are talking about tank bred and raised fish, you no longer know from the start whether these are genetically strong fish or not and the ramdom pairing could produce infertile eggs.
Next case, younger, first time breeders (actually first few times breeding) may not produce good hatching percentage even if they were the strongest genetically designed fish out there. So in order to KNOW what the best method is, you need to compare the different methods once the fish produce a strong hatch percentage under whatever method you are using at the time. For example: Assuming that all the other parameters are exactly the same, if your fish repeatedly produce a 60% hatch using meth. blue but then produce 75% hatch with using shrimp as the "protector", it would be safe to say that the shrimp make a better % hatching rate. But if you try one time with M.B. and get 50% then try a second time with Shrimp and get 75%, there is no conclusive data to say that the shrimp were the reason as the parents themselves could have matured which gave them the better hatching rate. You follow?
The only way to know for sure which is better is to have one repeated result that changes when you do something different.
If you follow some of the threads on here (AA) about breeding Angelfish, this process can't be more evident. Angels take about 4-6 spawns before they get the act "right". For this reason alone, no definite assumptions can be made about the viability of a pair until after those 4-6 spawns. For me, I just wanted to have 1 egg hatch in any of those first few spawns just to verify that fish were fertile. (It only takes one hatch to prove that
) It wasn't until after that period that I would assess whether to keep that pair together or to switch partners. In your case, since you have multiple males, you must make sure that you use the same male/ males to base your success or failures with.
As for the egg count, that's good.
The time it takes for the whole spawning process is irrelevent. Fish sometimes take breaks while spawning so time is meaningless to them.
Now, let's see some hatchlings from all this