More recent spawns

Take meee with youuuuuu!!! They are absolutely egg scatterers. The only reason I caught them was that I was on lunch duty in Friday while my husband went to get his updated PIV card. I was upstairs at 11:30 or so and noticed a skinny one chasing a fat one around fast & furious style. I hadn't seen that behavior before, but after a few minutes, the kids started demanding Mac & Cheese and duty called.

I made lunch, went to check in with work at my desk, then remembered "oh shit, I need to check on that behavior." That was probably at around 1 or so. I caught them racing around in an anubias filled crevice between two "boulders" in the 40 breeder community tank they call home. I saw eggs fall. I went back maybe 40 minutes later to see if they were still at it (didn't want to disrupt them) and couldn't find eggs on any leaves etc. (turns out they are NOT sticky). I knew where I'd seen some fall, so I used a pipette to force water through rock crevices. Sure enough, eggs popped out. The eggs are light transparent green, I'd say only about 50% of what I pulled out were fertile. They hatched Saturday, which was shocking. I don't think I've ever seen catfish eggs hatch so fast and I don't keep that tank particularly warm (77-79).

The yolk sacs are starting to shrink, but the fry are still miniscule. They are smaller than cory eggs - somewhere between Hy. wadai (ginormous for tetra eggs) and Cory pygmaeus (small for cory eggs) sized.

I did nothing special in this tank. The pH sits between 7.0 and 7.5 usually (it has CO2 and a pH controller on it). Lights start ramping up at around 10:30 am but the room gets plenty of natural light. Filtration is a Cobalt EXT and I have a Hydor koralia nano pump on the other side of the tank. It's pretty well planted with driftwood and some relatively large rockwork. If you were at BFD in 2019, it's the tank I had there, with the color-changing backlit background. I haven't water changed it since July 10 and they've only been in the tank since maybe a week before that. When I did water change it, I got distracted and drained the tank way too low. Then, in my distraction (sick kid), filled it with water that was MUCH warmer than it should've been. The end result was losing half my school of rummy-nose :-/ but I doubt these guys were influenced by it.