Thinking about Blue eyes

[blainep]

So I was pondering trying my luck with a few Blue eye rainbows and was looking for the voice of experience.

I've always liked the look of Furcata's, but I was thinking of maybe Signifier and/or Gertrudae as well.

Most of the info I can find is fairly generic, so I was wondering if there is anything particular to watch out for (other than finding healthy fish).


Any thoughts or insight is welcomed.

[jewels]

Carefully consider the quantity of your original purchase. From what I understand, (hearsay) ideally even within a species tank the male to female ratio is around one to every four. Also bear in mind productive breeding will occur mostly within the first half of a < two year lifespan.

(Just a wild hunch here)

If you are a fix'n to breed here is some prophetic math
You get twenty random sexed fish
10% shipping loss = 9Male & nine Female
two males for the nine F = seven display only malesStarts to sound labour intensive with eggs that come one or two a day and let us complicate issues with the fact that the daily collected eggs are anticipated as 50% viable. This again you may consider hearsay; as I have had a group of thirty in a heavily planted (you can believe that part:biggrin:) twenty gallon for a week or so now and the eggs do not seem to be piled up high when the lights come on!

[GaryofMontreal]

I've bred lots of gertrudae. They were like breeding killies, only the large eggs were easy to see. I started with five (2m, 3f). I spawned them in mops at room temperature, on a diet of live brine shrimp and flake.
Eggs were close to 100% viable.
The fry are small, but not that hard to feed.

P. furcata were about the same story, though I started with 6.

Right now I have signifer and tenellus - Singapore raised. They are listless, poorly coloured and obviously ill - good Singapore fish. I thought they were okay in the store, but it hit after I got them home, and they have been struggling since. I doubt I'll breed them.
I've had 50% losses over two months, but the fish have never come into form or behaved energetically. Watch your starting stock.

Blue eyes are among the coolest fish out there. I'd take a risk on them again in a heartbeat, but if I got clean specimens, I think this time I would hold on to them and breed them a lot. If these fish are going to prosper in the hobby, it'll be through hobbyists exchanging them.

[blainep]

Both of you have expressed my biggest concerns with getting healthy fish to start with.

I'm not to concerned about breeding them, if eggs and fry come, great, if not, at least they're pretty fish.

I've been thinking about trying them off and on for quite a while now. Maybe I'll annoy a few of the CAS members to see if anyone is actively breeding any.

[GaryofMontreal]

There are other alternatives - lampeyes. Our local Big Al's often brings in Poropanchax normanni, a brightly blue-eyed schooling killie from all along western Africa. They are dirt cheap and very stunning in a school. With the right lighting and a dark background, they are absolute traffic stoppers.
Occasionally, I read postings that Poropanchax luxopthalmus from Nigeria has shown up somewhere - it's just as hardy but has neon blue squiggles and often yellow fins to go with the reflective blue 'lamp' eyes.
Both are stunning fish, unlike Australian blue eyes not prone to tuberculosis, and dirt cheap. It may take some looking, but they are mass produced in Singapore without being obvious disease vectors. They also come wild in almost every African shipment.
If you put a few pairs of them in a 10 gallon with java moss and no other fish for about a week with good food, and then pull them, within a week to ten days, you'll find 50-100 easy to raise fry at the surface. Raise them up, and you're talking serious showtime.

[blainep]

Thanks for inviting the glass and silicone elves back into my house Gary ! :twitcy:

That is the number one problem with fish and aquariums, waaaayyyy to many choices.

Has anyone read or had any experience with D. Walstads findings regarding fish TB and UV sterilization ?

http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/forumapc/el-natural/47682-my-talk-presentation-fish-tb-disease.html

http://thegab.org/Articles/WalstadMyco_APC.pdf

[CACAdmin]

Thanks for those links. I had not read the article. Very interesting and informative. It does make me appreciate my UV Sterilizer that much more. However, it is on the tank where I normally introduce new fish post-quarantine.

What I found really interesting is the idea that "EM survive and thrive in nutrient-poor (i.e., “clean”) environments that starve ordinary bacteria." Thus there are more in very "ulta clean tanks".

The one thing I really like about running a UVS is that it doesn't harm the benficial bacteria and so I guess that thriving colony of good bacteria means a lesser chance of an expanding EM population should one be introduced into the tank.

[blainep]

One of the other things I found interesting in my reading is that the bacteria is covered in a waxy coating, that is why it is resistant to meds, apparently even somewhat resistant to bleaching.
You need to leave bleach in a tank considerably longer than normal to ensure it is killed.

[CACAdmin]

Definitely a good thing to keep in mind when disinfecting used tanks and equipment. :yes: (something with which you've had just a little bit of experience :wink: )

[GaryofMontreal]

I guess I'm predictable, because I have posted this before, but I've caught Mycobacter marinum in the past, and it's not to be taken lightly. I suppose it's made me a little paranoid about the disease. That uv sterilizer article really has my attention...