So your clownfish laid eggs, now what?
Congratulations, you are on your way to successfully raising clownfish! The fact that you have a breeding pair, and you're doing research proves you're on your way to being successful at raising the larvae. I would recommend Joyce Wilkerson's book Clownfishes
, it is an excellent source. I highly suggest you pick up a copy!
Equipment Needed
Small tank(s) - I use a 2.5 gallon and a 5 gallon to raise the fry
Heater with indicator light covered (Use electrical tape)
Air pump and Air stone
Rotifers & rotifer food
Black construction paper
Light source.
Food Chain
- Clownfish larvae are small and require special foods for you to raise them successfully. There are really three stages of foods that are used. The first being rotifers. Rotifers are small zooplankton that feed on phytoplankton. Some people grow there own phytoplankton to feed rotifers, I go the lazy route and buy Rotifer Diet from Reed Mari culture. I won't get into details about raising rotifers here, but there are many articles online on this subject. Here's an excellent article by Dr Frank Marini
- The second stage I have used newly hatched Baby Brine Shrimp (BBS) as well as cyclopeeze. IMO the BBS is a little more efficient overall as they are slower to fowl the water, but I've had success with both methods.
- From there I start them on ground up flake foods. (I grind and mix up a variety of foods)
Setup
Clownfish larvae are not well adapted to handle lighting from the side so we cover the 4 sides of a small (I start with a 2.5 gallon) aquarium with black construction paper. Have the hearer (with indicator light covered) and an air stone bubbling directly on the heater to help disperse the heat evenly throughout the tank. I keep the heater set to 81 degrees. (For every degree lower than 80 degrees this you'll delay metamorphosis by a day)
Days 0-4
Transferring the eggs/larvae:
There are three methods I have used to transfer larvae/eggs.
1) The night of the hatch fill the 2.5 gallon tank with water from the parent's tank. Transfer the entire rock that the eggs are on into the new tank. (Don't move them until the night of the hatch; the male clownfish does a much better job of keeping the eggs in motion than we can, let him do his job) Once there you want to put an open ended rigid air tube to keep the eggs in constant motion.
2) If they lay the eggs on a rock to big to fit, or not easy to remove you can catch the fry after they hatch. The night of the hatch right as the lights go out, turn off all of your powerheads and pumps. (I generally put in an air stone just to have some water movement but it's not a necessity). Around 30 minutes after the lights go out the babies will start to hatch, let them have a chance to hatch (somewhere between 30 minutes- 2 hours). Take a small clear bowl and halfway submerge the bowl. Take a small flashlight and shine it into the bowl. The larvae are phototropic and will be attracted to the light. Let the bowl stay there and try to scoop out as many as you can with each bowlful. It will take some patience and some practice, but gets easier over time.
3) Another option I've found was to use Joyce Wilkerson's larval snagger. I wish I had started with this method in the first place, it has maid it so much easier. Cut-off the end of a 2 liter bottle of soda and silicon it (Aquarium grade silicon) to a Permanent coffee filter. Put a small pump (40-100 gph) with a line running out of it the filter. Place the entire assembly inside a small tank. (I use a clear Rubbermaid container). Attach a "J tube. (I use two eheim return tubes) to the box and set the whole thing in the tank there the larvae will be hatching. Remove the air from the siphon tubes and start the pump up. You will now have a siphon on the J tubes that's pulling water in from the main tank. Shine a light on the end of the tube and sit back and relax! The larvae will be attracted to the light and get sucked up in the siphon. The permanent coffee filter will keep them safely in the hold. Let it go for a while and you'll have a container full of larvae!
Now that we have the larvae in the 2.5 gallon tank, along with water from the parent's tank, we need to get them some food. The only first food I have been successful with is rotifers. Strain enough rotifers through a 53 micron screen, (a coffee filter will work if you can't find a screen) to have enough rotifers in the tank so that there is a rotifer within one body length of all the larvae. At this point you are feeding the tank. I then add enough phytoplankton to the larvae tank to give it a slightly green tint. This is a method call co-culturing. The idea is to maintain rotifer reproduction in the larval tank to keep the rotifers alive while the larvae hunt them. I check on the tank 3-5 times a day and add more rotifers or phytoplankton as needed. Lighting for the tank is very important, it has to be bright enough for the larvae to hunt, but cant be too bright. If the larvae look like they are standing on there head at the bottom of the tank your light is too bright. Raise the light higher and/or put paper towels on top of the tank to filter the light. I lost half of my first couple of batches due to the light being too intense. I don't due any water changes the first three days, as it tends to be too stressful for the delicate larvae. I keep the light on 24 hours a day for the first 3 days and 12 hours a day after that.
Days 5-metamorphisis
From here until metamorphosis I add decapsulated brine shrimp to the tank, and stop adding phytoplankton. You don't want to add too many brine shrimp, as the larvae will eat too much and can die. I feed approximately 10-15 brine shrimp per larvae twice a day. At this point you are actually feeding the larvae and not the shrimp. In the mornings I start feeding a small amount of crushed up flake food (Finely ground with a mortar and peel). Just a little bit in the morning a bit before I feed brine shrimp, we are trying to get the larvae to start excepting flake food. Around day 9-11 the larvae will go through metamorphosis. At this point they will stop looking like little silver fish and start looking like a clownfish. They will broaden up and start getting there color and stripes! This process is very stressful on the fish, but after this things get much easier! I do a 20 % water change daily with water from the parent's tank.
Metamorphosis on
At this point I start weaning them off of brine shrimp and onto prepared foods completely. I usually crush multiple flakes/pellets and use the combination as the food from here on out. At this point we should be getting close to another batch being ready, so I move this batch to a 5 gallon tank with a sponge filter, and ready the 2.5 gallon for another batch of larvae!