First time breed

Hi Marijke,

I have just seen this thread. Ancistrus are magnificent parents. I would never move the male away from the breeding tank with eggs and fry, he protects them so well that the female would not have a chance of harming the fry. The second thing is that I would never remove the male from the fry because he is essential for looking after them. He keeps them in the cave and sees that they stay together. If you want to feed them you can feed them my granulate No1 but it is also important to feed the fry freshly hatched brine shrimps, they grow better on them. Later they become vegetarian, but when small they do better on a bit of crustaceans as well.

When breeding Ancistrus, it is best to establish a group consisting of one male and two to three females. Give the male a cave which he can occupy and chase the females into in order to spawn. When he spawns leave him right there, and when the fry hatch and resorb their yolk patches and come out of the cave start feeding bs and other granulates etc. Shortly after this he will spawn again with the next female and so it continues. You just need to feed well enough and you start an ancistrus factory second to none, then you eventually just start catching out the small ones that are about 5 cm in size but they will literally cover the whole tank like ants after a while.

So, perhaps you should just let nature have its way with the second spawn. A word of advice is that 28C for normal brown Ancistrus is the absolute maximum and I would advise 26C rather.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Hi Marijke,

Just one other thing. You are hoping to breed your L46's. You should use the experience that you gain with these normal Ancistrus for when you get far enough with the L46. When breeding L46, the same applies, do not move father or fry from the parent tank, just carry on as normal, the male does it all on his own with the other fishes still around.

An important additional aspect is that Ancistrus apparently have gut bacteria that they get from their father which help them to digest the vegetative material that they eat. This is typical for many plant eating mammals as well that they have gut bacteria. This is another reason why you do not want to separate the fry from the father as the fry eat some of his droppings to get these bacteria.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

@Dirk

Many thanks for the advise, and so the learning continues for me. I think I will make many mistakes going forward, but hopefully will learn from this experience. This all just happened so quickly, I knew I had a male and female, but when the male did not come out the cave I suspected something happened. In a mad rush I had to get a seperate tank for them, as I did not want my big display tank get full of little babies, and then me stressing out the discus when trying to catch them.

So in my ignorance I did remove the father Will not do this again. But there are still babies, now without there yolk sacs. I have started to feed spirulina tables(1/4) and will add some of your granules. Lets see what happens, if none survives, then yes I have learnt alot during this time. But I am still hopefull that I will have some success.

Many thanks

 

Hi Marijke,

I did not realize that they were in your tank with your discus. Your discus would certainly enjoy eating small Ancistrus so maybe it is better that you have moved them after all. However, you should then perhaps consider a separate tank for your Ancistrus. It can be without any gravel, just a strong filter and all will be fine.

Let us hope that the fry survive, and that next time things work out better. As you say one learns all the time....

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Maybe I should leave the next spawn in the display tank, so that my discus can have a lekker feast thats cruel I know, just joking

 

You may find that many of them will survive in any case if you have enough wood for cover, and they will be excellent polishers of whatever food is not eaten by the discus, so maybe this will work after all.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

UPDATE:

Day 7 and all fry are doing well. All are now out the cave and they measure about 1 and a bit cm. Feeding them frozen clyclops and Moina and also some protein powder from the Prof.

All seems to be going well at this point.

 

Update:

Tomorrow the babies are 3 weeks old. Just some pictures.