Cacatuoides eggs for a first time breeder. A few questions...

[tobraham]

Hello and Happy New Years to you all.

After a five year hiatus in keeping cichlids (african), I decided to venture into Cacatuoides. After researching them on this forum, Youtube (especially Aquatic Master's videos), and other places.. I decided I wanted to breed them. I've only had them for 2 months, and tonight I see some success. After coming home, I saw that she was being very aggressive towards other tank mates and guarding a ceramic cave.. pushing all the other fish to one side of the divided 40 gallon breeder. I checked the cave, and there were about 30 eggs stuck to the top of the ceramic pot cave. All the other tank mates were moved to the other side of the divider (1M & 1F Cacatuoides, 6 pencilfish, 1 Butterfly Pleco, and 1 Apple Snail) and moved the divider over a bit to give her about 10 gallons of space.

Should I move the mother and her eggs to another tank?

Should I start preparing food for fry now?

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,

moved the divider over a bit to give her about 10 gallons of space.
Should I move the mother and her eggs to another tank? Should I start preparing food for fry now?

You are probably best leaving the female in the 10 gallon space.

You will need some live food for the fry as soon as they are free swimming.

Live food elicits the feeding response from the fry, and you can feed a very small dried food with it. Rotifers from squeezing out a filter sponge will do if you don't have anything else. BBS are the best food.

As I don't have many fish at present, my juveniles get "Banana worms" and "Freeze Dried Arctic Copepods", but I keep very weedy tanks with lots of moss, so I have quite a large resident population of Copepods & Ostracods for them to have a go at as well. When they are bigger they get decapsulated BBS and Grindal Worms as well.

Live food is great and mostly fairly low maintenance to culture. I'd recommend Mike Hellweg's book "Culturing Live Foods: A Step-by-Step Guide for Culturing One's Own Food for the Home Aquarium".

cheers Darrel

 

[tobraham]

Thank you so much for all your tips. My local LFS breeds fish and has a steady supply of BBS and other small live animals for fry. I wasn't aware that the live food works so well with fry. I've seen many videos of fry just eating dry food (Repashy, ground flake/pellet, or boiled egg yolk mixed with water) and assumed that was an okay food source for them.