We have babies!
Fish babies! 😉
(Can you tell I’m excited yet?)
At least 3 of them! (From approximately 500 eggs, according to the fish website I consulted)
Totally unexpected too…
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On Tuesday I came back from England. I was there for a week and had been travelling in Germany for a few days before that.
It’s amazing what changes in a couple of weeks. My baby catfish are almost double the size they were when I left (:)) and the discus we quarantined died just before I got back (:(). The plants are threatening to turn into triffids (:/) and the duckweed layer was thick enough to block out most of the light.
This evening I finally got my act in gear and skimmed the duckweed off the top of the water in the big aquarium. I was planning to change the water and suck up all the algae from the bottom of the aquarium too, until DB said he’d prefer it if I cropped some pictures ready for printing on a T-shirt for a friend of his. I was almost finished with the duckweed anyway, so I stopped and decided to carry on with the algae tomorrow – one day more or less is no big deal… This algae grows faster than I can get it out, and collects in dust-bunny-like clumps. I don’t even know what kind of algae it is, but it’s how I imagine underwater tumbleweed..
Before I headed upstairs to the computer, I sat back to admire the light reaching all the way down to the pebbles for the first time in ages – and something tiny moved… We don’t have anything tiny living in there so I looked more closely – and there swam a very (VERY) small, VERY cute, perfectly formed, baby Trauermantelsalmler fish :). Not much longer than 4mm and a whole lot thinner. Then it was gone, hidden in a mess of long wavey ‘grass’ and tumbleweed. Then there was another one, smaller than the first, but still identifiable as a TMS, followed by a third. What a good thing I didn’t change the water!
I don’t know how long they’ll last since ALL the other fish (including the parents) are hungry savages when it comes to tiny baby fish (cuteness doesn’t get them anywhere; they’re better off swimming fast and hiding well) but I’m pretty sure there’s at least 3 which have made it this far (something like 8 days judging by the size) so we’ll see. Wish them luck 🙂
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WHOOO!!!
Let’s hope no one in there is hungry at all and has a long sleep until the babies are able to fend for themselves. How long until they would be fully grown?Good luck little fishies!
🙂 That would be great 🙂
I have no idea how long it takes to be fully grown, various websites say anything from 3 months to 2years. Depending on source, ‘fully grown’ is anywhere between 5 and 6.5 cm long – ours are maybe 4cm atm, so I’m pretty sure not even the parents have actually finished growing yet. Apparently they are usually sold at about 3 months old, which would make ours about 4 months old now, except that would make it unlikely that they laid eggs at all, since they’re supposed to be at least a year old (better 2)… I imagine it would take about a month (maybe 6 weeks) for them to be big enough not to be lunch, but I have no evidence or experience or even a decent amount of reliable reading matter to base that on….
So are they exotic fish? I’m thinking that because you haven’t reliable research material about them.
Yes, they’re from south America (Amazonas) There’s a lot of information about them out there, it just doesn’t seem to be talking about the same fish (5cm v 6.5cm long; easy v hard to look after; max. 26’C v max 28’C… etc) and if they do tell you anything about breeding, they don’t mention how quickly they grow. I asked the lady in the fish shop and she said it depends how much they eat… which is probably true, but not really helpful 🙁 Still, there are at least 4 still swimming around, so maybe they do stand half a chance 🙂
Good luck, fishies!
Thankyou! 8 or so have got this far 🙂 I’ll put a picture up if I can get one where they’re recognisable..