Here's Looking at You

58 hours

58 hours

68 hours

72 hours

72 hours

Spawning Tubs for Natural Crosses

Here is my set up for natural crosses.

I use hunter green, red heart acrylic yarn for my spawning mops and Penn Plax Baby Hideout Grass with a ceramic electric fence insulator as a weight.

Don't Count Them Until They Hatch

21.5 hours @ 70F

44 hours @ 70F

52.5 hours @ 70F

24 Hours of Development Sarassa Common Goldfish Eggs

Here are a few egg pictures.  They were taken by digiscoping with an Olympus Stylus 770sw on macro mode through a dissecting microscope at 40x.

Here is the whole process.

A good egg at 21.5 hours (~70 F)

One bad egg in the center

A closer look at a dead egg

A development series from Zebrafish (a carp species with very similar development)

Thanks to the Kimmel Lab. Click the Image for a full size view.

Put the Lime in the Coconut and Shake it All Up

The Sarassas were spawning like crazy this morning.  I netted out the couple I like the most and that were the most interested in spawning.  She was very ripe so I decided to hand spawn them in to petri dishes.  There were about a tablespoon of eggs and the male provided ample milt. It's extremely easy and does not harm the fish.

If a female is ready her stomach will be mush. I hold her in one had at the head end of her ovaries and apply firm pressure with your thumb and forefinger from both sides moving to the tail, eggs just come spilling out. If you only get a few and you're pressing give her another day to ripen. I look for eggs and find the female they are coming from.

Same process for the male just requires a bit more pressure.

I collect the eggs first, then squeeze the male on them then add a bit of water to the dish and swish around. If there are to many eggs for one dish I pour them into another dish back and forth and as they start to adhere they get a fairly uniform distribution.

Milt and Eggs

Put them in a small tank with aeration and I add Methylene Blue about 6 hours after they are fertilized. The benefit of hand spawning is that you get all the eggs in a small area in a short time so they all hatch together and make it easier to give them lots of food and water. They can be upwards of and inch long at one month.

The Female

The Male


The Result

A video of them after I put them in the tank.  I might have to isolate the females because he still wants more eggs.

http://www.youtube.com/v/MsNn-zThAIE&hl=en&fs=1

240 Gallon Glass Cage's Frameless Tank

Yet another former reef tank makes it into the Goldfish Garage. It's
a 240 gallon Glass Cage's Frame-less tank (8 feet x 2 feet x 2 feet)
that weighs about 500 pounds. This makes 4 monster tanks, they were
once large reefs but are now large clear ponds. I'm starting to
think of myself as the Grim Reefer, the undertaker who brings dead
reef tanks to the nether world of the Goldfish Garage.

Drove an hour to pick up the tank. Brought it home, had the guys
help put it into place and filled it with water 24 hours after
getting it home. There are a few large Sarassas stretching thief
fins in it. It has two over flow towers with two bulkheads each.
One will be plumbed to the goldfish system and the other to the
Tanganyikan Cichlid system with one of the spare bulkheads going
straight to drain. This way with just a stand pipe or cap and the
turn of a valve it's use can be changed from central goldfish,
cichlid or quarantine flow through.