Re: well if its not one its the other... A. uaupesi "red-wedge"

["joel metz, ifbma" <magpie@echo.com>]

>How big is your 'community ' tank?  Sometimes fish will spawn, and then eat
>their fry at the wriggler stage because they don't feel secure enough to
>raise the kids.  All kinds of animals will do this.  They don't want to
>waste their energy and food stores on what they 'feel' is a hopeless
>situation.  It sounds like your fish have spawned for sure.  Do you have
>anywhere else that you can put their competitors?  Once the female has her
>fry out free-swimming you may even have to pull the male.  Sometimes, and it
>doesn't even depend on the size of the tank, the female will get ready to
>spawn again when the fry are only about four weeks old.  Then, before you
>get a chance to do anything about it, she'll eat the fry and spawn again.
>If you take the male out, she'll usually look after them for a couple more
>weeks than usual, but because she does not have a male to spawn with again,
>she won't perceive the fry as competitors to her next batch, and she'll
>leave them alone.

the tank is a well-planted 55g, with the aforementioned apistos, and a mixed
 school of cardinal, loreto and bloodfin tetras, plus a cory (whos too big to
 even get under the saucers. fat little bugger.), a pleco, and an sae (who
 seems to like live food better than algae...) im working on getting some
 more smaller tanks up and running, just in case, but i cant always have the
 amount of tanks id like to on my paycheck... ive got a 30g waiting to have a
 stand built for it (whichll double the available space for small tanks - right
 now ive got 4 10s, only one of which is unoccupied, and space for 2 more...
 the new stand will have room for another 6 10s...) - id love to have 3-4
 tanks just sitting around set up and ready to accept a female with fry, but
 thats somewhere down the line...

>Some people like to keep dither fish around so that at least for a while the
>male is busy defending the territory against relatively innocuous fish.  I
>have found however,  that even supposed non-threatening fish like Neon
>Tetras or White Cloud Mountain fish will take advantage of any fry that
>strays a few inches from it's mother.  For this reason, I  keep moms alone
>with their fry if I want to have a large survival rate.

right now, im not really all that concerned with a large survival rate... id
 be happy with an actual spawn, and some surviving young... im
 inexperienced at this, though, and whatever experience i can gain out of
 this is fine by me for now... im having a heck of a lot of fun simply
 keeping the apistos ive got - a spawn right now would be sort of a
 surprise bonus :)

-joel




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