This is indicative of my smaller tank. Note the floating enclosure in the background, full of Cory eggs. Now the Cory female laying more eggs on the glass. In fact there is another enclosure on the right, with Cory Fry! Scattered about you can see one month old Bristlenose'.

LMAO welcome to your zoo

As it turns out, that last lot was totally infertile.

I now know which female that was. A couple of months back I discovered eggs on my filter cannister. Since this is located behind a partition where fish shouldn't be, I shone the torch down. One lonely female, must have swam in there as a fry.

She obviously hasn't learnt to place eggs along with the males as yet.

As you two may recall, my paleatus spawned four times in five days (307 eggs) and a lot of them were infertile. I know that's not uncommon with first spawns. The last two of the four spawns should start hatching tomorrow morning and I'm noticing a lot of the eggs aren't 'browning up.'

I'll be interested to see if these guys get better at it as time goes on.

So far I got 107 fry from 231 eggs...we'll see what the other spawns bring.

Kana:

I like the idea of that enclosure. A lot! I'm going to hit my favorite LFS lady up for a couple when I go tomorrow. I've heard people mentin them...but have never seen a picture. Nice!

I remember my first spawn. I only found half a dozen eggs. I thought "WOW"! Collected them up, placed them in the enclosure. After a couple of days they darkened and went a murky clear. "Damn - they're no good", I thought. I tipped them back into the tank. Later discovered the bad ones turn white! "Double Damn!"

Five or six weeks later.."Wait a minute...what's that?...A baby Cory!...no wait..another one..oh..and another!"



Here's my Breeding & Fry Tank (My first ever tank - all plastic - light, pump, filter, heater all built in). That partition on the left, is down where I found the full grown female. Center front is the Egg/Fry floating enclosure. I've put a fine mesh in each end. Water flow is clock-wise around the tank. The 2 to 4/5 week hanging enclosure is the larger down the right. You can easily see the medium mesh I've added, that faces direct into the Pump outlet. There is an Airstone here as well - it's out for the photos. I sometimes have two floating enclosures.

Neat setup Kana

I saved the pic for future reference.

I got myself one hang onthe side enclosure yesterday...and my paleatus are all over each other again today. So far it's in mytank holding 17 more eggs.

Domo arigato. Do-itashi-mushite.

I'm not sure what you've seen from my pics, but I've found that water in the plastic traps can become stale very quickly. (Something I attribute to my past losses). There are two fixes, I've applied. One is to regularly lift the enclosure from the water (NOT completely), and then put it back in. This drains most of the stale water out, then replaces it with fresh water from the tank.

The second method, which I favour is, scoot out to your local fabric shop. Buy a few different gauges of wedding viel mesh. (I have three gauges to handle different size Fry). Cut windows in your hanging/floating enclosure, and silicon the appropriate gauge mesh over the window.

Tips from me: Don't extend the window to the floor of the enclosure, you need a lip to stop food flowing out. And to a certain degree, the same applies to the top of the window, not the best to have it extend above the water line.

Also, before cutting windows, have a think about positioning in the tank, and how does the tank current flow. It's good to have a nice water flow through the enclosure, but bear in mind Tip 1 above. In my pic above, larger enclosure, flow comes in through my mesh in the far end left side. Flow goes out through the original slots in the front facing short side.

If you use dry powdered food, you'll still need an airstone to agitate, and sink the food. Oh, one more thing. Note the white spots in the floor of my smaller Egg enclosure. This is glue, to block the manufactured circulation holes, that are big enough to let fry excape!

Now Gary, let's see how you handle eggs being laid under the base of your Fry enclosure...

Ha! I'm so far from any spawning going on anywhere near my enclosure.

My enclosure currently has no flow at all...it's just there to leach off the heated water in my 55 gallon - not the breeder tank with some methylene blue in it.

I'm just gathering ideas.

Currently, all my eggs & fry are in closed no-flow enclosures that I just do a ba-zillion water chabges on.

Fair enough. I just change the water in the Tank as a whole. The effect of course, flows on to the enclosures.