Fwd: Re: pseudocrenilabrus

["Ed Pon" <edpon@hotmail.com>]

Bob Dixon said:
>Ed-
>Isn't that a bit extreme?  I know if I were a fish, that would leave me
>emotionally scarred for life.  It has been my experience, however 
limited,
>with Pseudocrenilabrus, that the female will release fry into the tank
>whenever she thinks she is about to be eaten.  That may be scary 
enough, but
>it is a xhort-lived experience compared to the baster.  I suppose if 
you
>could trick her into the baster, then put the bulb on, it might not be 
so
>bad.  But physically, it would still seem to me to be kinda rough on a 
fish
>that is already weakened from a lengthy period of fasting.
>Just my own opinion-
>Bob

Bob--The best suggestion, if the goal were to get as much fry as 
possible, is to move the female to a separate tank until she is ready to 
release.  The turkey baster method is actually pretty fast. I have heard 
stories of people trying various methods of stripping mouth 
brooders--many of which sounds much worse than the turkey baster method.  
Some people use their thumbnails to pry the mouths open.  Some use the 
point from a pencil to open the mouths. Some hold the fish in their 
hands and try to dunk the fish's head in and out of a bowl of water. The 
relative size of the human hand to a two-inch female pseudocrenilabrus 
makes these other method prone toward damaging the female's mouth.

Many of the mouth-brooders will hold their fry as long as almost a 
month, making them severely emaciatiated.  Some literature actually 
advocates stripping the females for this reason alone.  If tank space 
were limited, in all likelihood the brooding female will eat little or 
nothing and she is usually chased and harassed by her tank mates (most 
often a male that wants to breed).  In a tank by herself, the female in 
many mouth-brooders will eat small pieces of food while brooding.  When 
the fry have formed, the female will release the fry to do some foraging 
and then she can also get a bite as well.  If there are other fish in 
the tank, the female is less likely to allow the fry to leave her mouth 
to forage naturally.

  I'm not an advocate of stripping mouth-brooders, but the fish I 
usually deal with are somewhat precious  and the stripping allows the 
female to recover earlier from a "pregnancy" and start to produce more 
fry.  The fry, being also precious, is removed from the "community" tank 
to a safer place for them.  People who are serious about reproducing 
mouth-brooders will usually keep them in groups as opposed to pairs, and 
the non-brooding fish are a danger to fry growing in the tank.

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