Send in the Clowns - Clown Fish Breeding

[Ross]

Well, its been an interesting journey... The fry are now 6 night old.

When my lights were scheduled to go out, I turned off all my pumps and waited...
...about 45 minutes later, the fry started popping from there eggs and swimming around in a jerky fashion.
They populated my 3' tank from one side to the other by the time they were done hatching.
I took a flashlight, dimmed it by placing a few layers of paper towel over the end and set it up shining down into the tank on my eurobrace.

MY wife and I then took turns vacuuming them via a Ø1/4" silicone air line into a 5 gallon tank I had previously set up.

I filled it with display tank water and set a 50w jager heater to the same as the display.

There were many fry that were not too attracted to the light, but would rather hang around the sand bed in the flashlights beam.
So I took a ridgid airline, flared the end with a glass drill bit and finished extracting them with it.

I wrapped the 5 gallon in a garbage bag and kept it dim in the room.

My rotifers were slow to recover from a vacation I took a month prior. So I was in a mad search to find some live ones.
At the time there were no LFS carrying them. Some stores had no clue what I was talking about, others had the default "In our next shipment" answer.
One recently set up store that was up until recently a vendor managed to connect me with a local breeder that was very friendly and willing to share his knowledge and his rotifers for a small fee.
A search of Kijiji located a local person selling clown fish. Naturally if you have small clown fish you have fry, so I contacted them and managed to pick up some from him also.

The first night, there was approximately 15-20 that died off. (The turn into a clear white corpse fairly quickly. Presumably due to the high concentration of rotifers in the tank.)

The second and sequential night there have been 4-6 clowns dieing off.

I estimate that there are somewhere in the neighbor hood of 120 actively swimming on day #6.

They should be metamorphosing shortly, So I have to get my brine shrimp going.

Taking decent photos has been challenging until I had the realization that external flash is the way to go...

[Ross]

Day 6:



LARGE mouths for eating small Rotifers:




Cruising around with an open mouth:




Eye control is fully functional at this point:

[gregzz4]

Great pics
Good luck Dad

[Coralgurl]

Ahhhhmazing pics!! This is one of the coolest threads ever! Thanks for sharing! Good luck

[Eduardo]

Very cool. Great job on the pics and updates.

[Azzkr]

Great pictures must be very hard to get pics of those tiny fish. You must of had to take a insane amount of pics to get those few good ones. Keep up the good work.

[Ross]

Thanks everyone.

The depth of field (area in focus) with a macro lens is small to begin with, add in the erratic movements of the fish and yeah, it took "a few shots" to get them in focus.
At times there was a bit of the "spray and pray" approach to getting them but this proved less effective than sitting idly by patiently waiting.

I like how the rotifers are captured along with the fry. The fry are smaller than a grain of rice and the rotifers are just dust compared to them.