Understanding Fish Breeding Techniques

At one point or another if your pet fish is living comfortably and in healthy state, soon enough you will find little fry swimming in tank. As an aquarist, this is perhaps the most interesting subject of fish keeping because the excitement to see the fish grow from a tiny dot-like fish to become a fully grown adult is indeed satisfying. You might also want to collect the newborns for conservation purpose or sometimes even without your intervention, the fish will reproduce by themselves and the next thing you know, there will be some fry hiding among the aquatic plants. This is especially important if you are keeping rare and exotic fish species and you will want to collect the next generation of fry so that there will be continuity of your effort or maybe for commercial purposes to profit from the sales of the newborn fish. Captive breeding is also the only answer to ensure that aquarium fish species in the world are maintained as natural environmental condition keeps on degrading due to over pollution.

There are few major concerns when it comes to fish breeding. As a responsible owner, it is your job and duty to ensure that the young fish fry has enough space to live in and never neglect their well beings. Although at times, the routine is actually unplanned, it is still your responsibility to ensure there is as much humane treatment as possible to take care of the fish and if you are unable to provide your best commitment, it would be a good idea to give away the newborn fish to other owners who will better appreciate them. Another issue facing aquarium fish breeding is on the problem caused by inbreeding. Far too many stocks actually turn out to be inferior in terms of coloration, size, reduced hardiness and susceptibility to disease because these fishes were subject to line breeding occurring among the siblings. As a result, the fish that you see today is nothing compared to their parents caught from the wild. As mentioned earlier, captive-bred fish also produce stocks which are low quality and as a result often get rejected and thrown away.

Examples of egg layers. Rasbora and Neon Tetra fish

Producing high quality fish
In order to produce top notch quality fish, there are few considerations that you will need to take care of. First, selection of breeding partner is important, second, if possible avoid line breeding and third, try to cull the fish which are deformed and deemed low in quality. Selection of breeding partner should be simple because most of the times you can control which fish you want to select to become parents but there is also some tricky process whereby certain fish types like cichlids will only pair up on their own. These fish can be extremely unpredictable and will end up rejecting the partner which you select for them. Thus there is little on what you can do here unless it is other types of fish. In order to avoid line breeding, you can actually approach members in your local community fish club or friends and ask around whether they have the same mature stock. This will ensure that high quality fry are produced which are more beautiful and retains some of the desired characteristic from the parent fish. In a batch of fry, not all will end up achieving equal growth rate. Some are very dull in colors, others deformed, while there a few which didn’t catch up at all in terms of size. Therefore, culling should be carried out just like natural selection process in the wild so that only the strongest, most mature are retained to produce the future generation.

Different fishes have their own ways of reproduction and how they will care for the young. There are basically two groups; one is the egg-layers fish and the other one which will produce free swimming fry, also called live-bearers. Goldfish, discus, most cichlids and tetra fish all belong to the egg laying group while live-bearers like guppies, swordtails and platy will give birth to larger-sized fry which are already able to fend for themselves. Most fishes are known to leave their young offspring, after they have given birth. Most do not even provide care but there are others like cichlids which are very protective and will aggressively attack intruders if they sense danger. Most fishes will leave the eggs scattered while some parents will even devour the own eggs. Guppies and swordtails which are live bearers are also known to hunt down and eat their own offspring and that is the most shocking thing that you will ever find out. Therefore if you have intention to collect all specimens and do your own selection later part, then the best thing to do is that the parents should be transferred to their own breeding tank and then removed once the eggs are laid or the fries are dropped. This is to ensure you have the highest survival rate so that later you can cull and select the ones with the best features. Thus, if you have community aquarium whereby it is heavily stocked, normally you will find that very few offspring actually managed to survive and avoid all the predators.

Conditions for breeding
In order to encourage your fish to breed, the living environmental conditions like water temperature, pH and oxygen content must be at the right level and suitable for them. Sometimes you can induce breeding by introducing variety of fish diet supplying more live foods compared to the dry pellets. Most fishes require large breeding space to move around and some species like the cichlids require rocky type of setups like stone to declare as their breeding spot. Other fish like the goldfish will start to spawn with presence of a lot of live aquatic plants but there are some which do not require any of these conditions and will happily reproduce. Most of the time, fish owners prefer for the affair to be carried out and done in another separate tank rather than the main display aquarium so that the breeding pair can have better privacy and more control can be exerted especially with creating different breeding environment. Sometimes, not all fishes will readily breed on their own effort without your intervention and because of this reason; techniques were developed to use artificial methods like hand-spawning. This is especially important for those types of fish species which are generally slow swimmers, inactive in nature or they have limited bodily capability for example poor eye-sight like the bubble-eye goldfish. Dealing with egg layers are even more complicated because sometimes even when you managed to get them to spawn and release the eggs, not all of it will be fertile and most will be subjected to fungus infection. Certain species will only breed during certain period of time or seasons and thus, it will be quite difficult to actually catch them in their act and plan for the breeding program.

More about fish reproduction: How cichlids fish care for their young fry

Choice of Fish Foods for Pets

Fish needs variety of diet and quite often it is a mistake to feed the same type of foods everyday. While it is very convenient to use the proprietary dried fish pellets, soon enough you will find that your pets will become bored and unhappy. Each individual fish species has their own preferences and some need to have meaty diet in order to stay healthy. Quite a number of species are opportunistic feeders, eating smaller sized fish or young fry while some will grab just about anything that comes along. In the wild, the fish has a lot to choose from including insects that dropped into the water, worms, larvae, water fleas, algae, aquatic invertebrates, snails and even plants but in your home aquarium, what they get depends entirely on you.

A good practice is to provide both live foods and flakes so that your fish get the best of everything

As an aquarist, it is your responsibility to understand your pets’ needs. There are different types of fish with each having their own feeding habits. Some species will take the food floating on the top; some like the catfish are bottom feeders, so it’s your job to find out and observe their feeding nature. Thus if you are providing floating sticks, your catfish will find it difficult to get to the foods and will have a hard time competing with the other fish in the community aquarium. When to feed and how frequent are also important questions you need to ask yourself. By right, the maximum number of times you will need to drop the food is only twice a day and never go beyond that because it is totally unnecessary and will just end up polluting the water. Apart from that, always make sure that you are dropping the correct quantity of foods with the right amount and high quality diet. Remember it’s not just the quantity but the quality is also extremely important.

The size of your foods also needs to be taken into consideration. Small pet fish like the neon tetra has a very tiny mouth opening and they will find it difficult if you provide pellets that don’t fit in at all. In this case, what they need are crushed flakes or powdered form which they can grab and eat as a whole. For large predatory fish, like for example the arowana, it might be a good idea to provide small size fish that they will find it easy to swallow. When it comes to feeding fish fry, never provide chopped worm meat that will be difficult for them to swallow. From my own experience I had a couple of young goldfish fry which actually got choked and died because they were trying to swallow the worms. By right, the best choice of foods for young fish is brine shrimp and until today, it remains the common agreement among all aquarist. While all these are pure common sense, most people still got it wrong because they just don’t bother and leave it for their pets to handle.

Cleanliness is also issue and this is one you should pay particular attention to. Not all foods are safe especially those made for pets. If you are providing live foods like tubifex worms caught from the wild, then exercise caution because these worms are known to harbor disease and they are often found living in contaminated wastewater. If you are providing dried pellets, check for the expiry date, study the ingredients and content before you decide to buy. If you are getting your bloodworm supply from your pet shops, ask around where they actually get those from. If you are unsure, try not to take the risk but if you insist, the most you can do is to leave it for some time and change the water so that this will help to clean the worms. However, there is no guarantee that doing this will be good enough. Some people take the extra effort to grow their own live worms supply. One of the methods you can try is to obtain microworms culture from your friends and then cultivate it enough to support your fish population. However one word of caution, these microworms culture can produce quite unpleasant odor, so you have to decide whether you want to bear with the smell.

Dried foods in pellets, sticks, flakes and granules are very popular and as mentioned earlier, are the most convenient form of foods you can provide to your pets. All these are packed in plastics bottles, jars and whatever packaging form you can find which are often very colorful and attractive. The most important criteria when selecting the right type of foods is by looking at the content and ingredient stated and look for those which contain the necessary protein like wheatgerm, vitamins, and trace elements needed for your fish. Pay particular attention to those that are made specially for certain types of fish. Sometimes you can find carnivorous pellets made for Oscars, special formulation for goldfish and koi or even herbivorous mix. Long term feeding using only dried foods are not recommended as most of the time, your pets can suffer from malnutrition, digestive problems due to swelling of the foods in the stomach and the fish will often become stunted. Thus, use it only as filler meal while the best nutrition should still come from the preparation of live feeds.

Guide on setting up new aquarium and aquarium water management

Moving on to live foods, there are certainly long list of options. White worms or called microworms can be very popular as mentioned earlier can be cultivated in your own backyard. Earthworm is also another popular choice and if you have a garden and heaps of compost, then you will find abundance of these worms when digging through the soil. Tubifex can also offer another alternative but these buggers are often found in contaminated water so make sure you know what you are doing. Other than worms, if you have ponds nearby, you can actually go on a field trip to collect daphnia, bloodworm, mosquito larvae, cyclops including insects which will be readily devoured by your fish. Certain people took the extra effort to leave buckets of water in their backyard hoping that the mosquito will lay eggs there so that they can collect the larvae and bloodworm but be careful because if you don’t catch every one of it, some may actually reach adult stage to become mosquito. Certain countries have tight regulations concerning this practice as it illegal to leave stagnant waters in order to become breeding place for mosquito and these insects are known to harbor dangerous disease that can be life threatening to humans.

Finally one last option is market foods. Some aquarists are known to use meat, fish fillets, prawns, mussels, beef heart to feed carnivorous fish like oscar, discus and arowana. If you have pets that are herbivorous in nature, for example like gourami, then it should be easy as you can use peas, spinach or lettuce to supplement their diet.

Aquarium Water Management

Maintaining the right water condition is essential to ensure that your fish that depends on it stay healthy. Thus understanding water chemistry is very important and every aquarist should put in some effort to at least grasp the basic knowledge. Different fishes have different demand. Some live only in freshwater, some require saltwater while others require a little bit of saline such as the brackish condition. There are also certain species of fish like the puffers which can live in different water salinity depending on its age. Apart from that, aquarium water can also be defined as hard, soft, acidic, alkaline, high or poor in oxygen content including some other parameters like nitrite, nitrate and ammonia which can determine how stable or polluted the water is. Pet fish which are confined living in the aquarium has no means to escape if suddenly the water turns bad and thus you need to put in the best effort to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Going deeper into water chemistry
As mentioned earlier, for a fish to survive, its body must be in tune with the changes of the environment and failure to adapt can result in condition which is life-threatening. Certain fish which are considered hardy can adjust its metabolic condition to suit the alterations and whatever changes happening around and no matter how strong they can be, they will need time to adjustment themselves. That was why any sudden new introduction that can cause pH, temperature and water hardness level to shift has to be perform with care in order not to upset the condition. Sometimes sudden changes can be fatal, and this often happens in certain species of fish which are less hardy and are very sensitive to the environmental change. Therefore, when you hear the term “hardiness” what this basically translates to is the ability of the fish to adapt and not every species has the same tolerance level. Some of the pets which are hardy are the platy, swordtail, catfish while those which are extremely sensitive are discus and neon tetra.

Which type of fish food is most suitable for fish?

The fresh water that comes out from the tap is usually not suitable to be directly added to the aquarium. It must be treated in order to modify the water chemistry to meet the needs of the demanding species. Depends on which type of pets you have and the overall water quality, the treatment step to add conditioner and pH buffer can sometimes be quite expensive in the long run. There is another trick whereby you can always do dilution in order to not change condition in extreme manner. Basically how to achieve this is very simple. If let’s say you are changing the tank water, try not to take out more than 50% of the whole volume and thus new top up level that you add in will not suddenly cause the water parameter to shift. Usually sudden increases in hardness level, temperature or pH are the ones that can have dire effects, therefore make all effort to control these 3 so that they will not run off too much. The process becomes even more complicated when it comes to marine aquarium systems because you can longer use ordinary tap water. Usually it has to undergo another extra treatment process to convert it to RO water so that most of the impurities are removed.

Water hardness
Hardness is determined by the amount and concentration of mineral salts present in it and what it means is that the more salt it contains the harder the water is. Water can become hard through natural process like leaching of mineral salts coming from the soil and rocks or by manual means if you decide to add and dissolve salts into it. Certain rocks like granite and slate has very little up to none soluble material in it but there are others for example like limestone which can leach and change the hardness level quickly. If you are thinking of setting up a soft water aquarium for discus, then make sure you add in the décor that will not affect and the water chemistry drastically. Even if you have plans to add gravel, sometimes check carefully as it may contain fragments of limestone which can alter the water condition. However, this is the opposite if let’s say you want to set up a hard water tank for keeping cichlids, then you should consider these options to increase hardness level.

How to get started with new aquarium

There are several actions you can do to change the condition. Increasing mineral salt content is much simpler as you only need to add shell and limestone which can instantly alter the water chemistry. But however, the opposite of decreasing it can become tricky as basically you will need to dilute the water with softened water such as rain water or distilled water which you will need to collect. There are other terms which you will need to familiarize as well such as carbonate hardness (those salts comprising only of bicarbonates) expressed in unit of KH while GH is the general hardness which takes into account all the dissolved salts present in the water.

pH
pH scale measures between 0 to 14 with 7 being neutral, 0 being extremely acidic while 14 extremely alkaline. Most aquarium fishes have their requirements fall within the range of 6 – 8 while there are other extraordinary species that require beyond that. Normally most common aquarium fishes has the preferences fall at the neutral pH zone. In order to find out your pH reading, commercial aquarium test kits can provide fast results and these days, there are even electronic pH meters dipped into the aquarium water which can give online reading and up-to-date information. pH of the water is caused by presence of different substances dissolved in it. Mineral salts which you add to harden the water can at the same time make it alkaline while soft waters are normally slightly acidic. Peat and wood that normally contain decaying materials can cause the water to acidify. Apart from these natural occurring materials, some commercial liquid pH adjuster can also be added to obtain the desired pH reading. There are also buffer pH tablets which are added to control and regulate the pH level to a certain desired range. For example, if the water becomes too acidic, then it will release a certain chemical compound to raise the pH level and vice versa if the water becomes too alkaline.

Temperature
This is also another parameter to watch out because certain pet fish can be very sensitive to changes and sometimes extreme fluctuation can cause temperature shock. Some species like discus fish are known to develop complications as a result of temperature change and most of the time, some can end up becoming sick and will be prone to disease. Usually temperature shock can be avoided by controlling the amount of volume taken out and replaced during water change. Temperature can also be affected by the surrounding environment, thus if you can afford it, use a heater or chiller to regulate and control the temperature. Apart from maintaining health and ensure survival of the species, temperature also plays a part to induce spawning. Certain fishes like the goldfish react to temperature change which can cause the male and female to release the milt and eggs. At times, when the fish is sick, you will need to adjust and increase the level slightly in order to expedite the healing process.

Learn about fish tank filters and its role in maintaining clean water condition. Aquarium decoration.