- Messages
- 211
- Location
- camden,oh
after being out of the hobby after a couple of years i have started to keep and breed a few kinds of fish again.i have raised at least 2 or 3 thousand rams in the past but for some reason this time around i am having problems.this particular pair will eat the fry if i leave them in for more then about a day.i used to try to leave them with the parents for the first few days but it varied from pair to pair.the parents are in soft water (about 50 ppm) that i soak 4 or 5 indian almond leaves in about 5 gallons of water for a couple of days.this is what i do the water changes with.dont know ph as my meter isnt working properly(but i really dont care what ph is parents are happy and hatching @ 200 to 250 eggs every 2 to 3 weeks) i suck the fry out as soon as they freeswim into a 2.5 gallon tank.first time they all fungused up .second time i managed to salvage 47 fry.16 the third time and only 6 the fourth time.they just had a bunch freeswim and it looks like the majority of these guys are going to die too. they stay right at the top of the tank in the corners and against the side of the tank and die within a day and a half.i cant figure out whats going on.i thought maybe there was a lot of ammonium in the parents tank water(i only change 5 gallons every 7 to 9 days because i have limited access to soft water unlike before when i was breeding them and had as much as i needed) and that possibly when i added the green water or infusoria(it was in my hard tap water ) the ph was going above 7 and the ammonium was turning into ammonia and killing the fry.i was very careful this time not to add anything that wasnt in parents tank water and i added a small amount of prime when i took them(i suck them out with quarter inch rigid tubing and a length of airline just like i always did) .it would take longer for them to starve to death then they are living so i know something is killing them.the 47 i got to live i did 100% water change into my clean 400ppm 8.4 ph tapwater.i always transitioned them into my tapwater when they were a few days old but i normally did it incrementally over the course of a day.the only thing i used to do differently was that i kept the fry in gallon jugs until they were big enough to take newly hatched bbs in stead of 2.5 gallon tanks(with maybe 1.5 gallons initially of water) i have decided to set up a couple more 10 gallon tanks and move the parents around instead of the fry which i think will solve the problem(i'll have to come up with more soft water though) but i still would like to know what is making them go up to the top of the tank like that.i had electric blue ram fry do this to me before right before i quit keeping fish and was only able to get a handful of them to survive.i never figured out what the problem was.i tried putting a light over them this time but it didnt help.have any of you ever had this happen before.i thought about trying to get another pair to work with to see if they might raise the fry to at least 3 or 4 days old(i found i was pretty much home free once they go to the point that they could take bbs) but i havnt seen any around here that are nearly as pretty as this pair some of the fry will be ready to spawn in a couple months and i plan on working with them.they are about 1.5 inches long and already starting to color up really nicely.