got ethical husbandry?

Daayum! My froggies are at it again!

Thanks Jim :)

Btw, this is a quickie diagram of the egg/larvae setup.

incubator.jpg
 
Good news, bad news...


The bad news...

I started losing larvae at the 5th day after hatching, and they were pretty much gone by the 7th day. I think it was a water quality problem mainly. I had NH3 and NO2 at .5ppm :(

I was doing daily water changes, but probably should have been doing larger amounts. Difficult to do though. I had an airline tube with some mesh over the end, and the babies were so small that they wanted to get stuck on the siphon. What's the trick to changing water and siphoning debris with such small larvae in the tank? Keeping baby discus tanks clean was easier!

The good news...

The frogfish spawned again on Monday evening. Last night, I set up a 10 gallon tank with an AC 350, live rock, and a DIY kreisel. (Went to bed at 4am. Ugh....) The kreisel has a meshed opening for water exchange with the main tank. I figure I can get some diffusion that way to help maintain water quality. Also, I can do a slow drip of tank water into the kreisel to help flush metabolites through.

Took some videos of the pre spawning activities and of the egg raft floating around the kreisel. Probably should see some larvae inside the eggs tonight, and should have babies by the weekend.
 
Good thing that you haven't give up yet.. Keep trying and you will success. I wish my 2 clown fish do something so I can try out. :(
 
Mr. Ugly said:
Good news, bad news...


The bad news...

I started losing larvae at the 5th day after hatching, and they were pretty much gone by the 7th day. I think it was a water quality problem mainly. I had NH3 and NO2 at .5ppm :(

I was doing daily water changes, but probably should have been doing larger amounts. Difficult to do though. I had an airline tube with some mesh over the end, and the babies were so small that they wanted to get stuck on the siphon. What's the trick to changing water and siphoning debris with such small larvae in the tank? Keeping baby discus tanks clean was easier!

The good news...

The frogfish spawned again on Monday evening. Last night, I set up a 10 gallon tank with an AC 350, live rock, and a DIY kreisel. (Went to bed at 4am. Ugh....) The kreisel has a meshed opening for water exchange with the main tank. I figure I can get some diffusion that way to help maintain water quality. Also, I can do a slow drip of tank water into the kreisel to help flush metabolites through.

Took some videos of the pre spawning activities and of the egg raft floating around the kreisel. Probably should see some larvae inside the eggs tonight, and should have babies by the weekend.
Click to expand...

You can always use light to attract the larvae to the top of the water column, allowing you to siphon the bottom.
 
Looks like this 4th batch of eggs wasn't fertile. I didin't get any larvae from it at all.

Now the surprise... there is a 5th batch of eggs. I just saw the egg raft this evening. It looks like it might be 1 or 2 days old. They are very transparent on the first day and hard to see unless the light hits them just right. These are slightly more opaque than a fresh egg raft. I didn't catch any of the mating behavior this time.

Don't know how viable these eggs are. I'm kinda concerned since it's been less than a week since the previous batch.
 
Just a quick post for now.

5th batch of eggs was a success in the new kreisel. Babies are 6 days old today.

I split the batch of larvae with Jim/Bookfish last night to increase the chances of raising these guys to adults :) I am so psyched!

Some vids here:

http://www.putfile.com/mr_ugly
 
Yes, I've always wanted an ugly baby and now I have hundreds!
The morning feeding went well and after eating, the fry were actually visible in the tank.
(did Norm forget to mention they are as long as a grain of rice is wide?)
I'm almost done feeding the rotis (thx Gresh) and soon the evening frog feeding begins. Norm will be here shortly and we'll be trying for some good pics/vids etc...
ps. Hi everyone!
 
Jim/Norm, do you think they'll take newly hatched brine shrimp? Do you have San Francisco strain? I've got tons of eggs, but they're all Salt Lake strain.
 
Yep, I'm figuring they'll take nhbs at some point after rotifers. Those eggs are decapsulated? Haven't picked up any yet. I'm not familiar with the difference between SF and SL shrimp. SL is supposed to be "better", no?
 
Got back late from Bookfish's. Took some vids of the froggies again. Interesting new thing. For the last couple days, I've seen groups/swarms of the larvae gathered together in one spot or patch at the bottom of their container. First time was maybe 25% of the larvae, and I almost thought I imagined it. Last night, maybe 50% had been grouped together tightly. This was about 5 hours after a feeding. I gave them another dose of rotifers around 1am (filtered 1 gallon of culture), after which I didn't see any settled down in the container any more.

I tried editing the vids I"ve been collecting this past week, but kept zonking out and just went to bed at 3.

Here's a short clip of some of the previous pre-spawning behavior. Female's swollen vent is visible.

http://media.putfile.com/frogfish-mating-behavior
 
As far as I know, SF strain are smaller, much easier to transition to from rotis. No, decapsulated eggs won't hatch. I gave most of my eggs to a reefphilippines member, but can drip off a bit on Saturday; I'm going to Alameda in the AM. I've had them for over a year, (in the fridge) they should really be used soon.

I've also noticed clown larvae and fry schooling. After gorging on nhbs, their belly turns pink and bloated! So does baby banggais.
 
Ah, ok!

Mark, hard to tell regarding die off.... they are way small and there are so many. I'm sure some didn't make it this far though.

Ok, someone asked about names for the frogs...

As of today, the dorehensis pair will be known as Nemo and Dory :lol:
 
I think that trying to raise these frogfish is awesome Norm. I would love to see some tank raised frogfish, I bet they would be much hardier. I'm sure many of us would be willing to help you raise them ( I know I would) if you start getting burned out and still have eggs/ larvae being produced by your pair. Because of the high mortality of these fish captive raised ones would be great. Keep up the good work.

Mark
 
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