Gorgeous! Thanks for sharing your breeding details.

Hi Patchin!

I am guessing that the first to start showing color was around 4-5 months. the eight fry were in a 10 gallon tank filtered with 2 - 4" poret foam bottom filters. As usual, one fish grew quicker than all the rest ( there is always one pig in the group). He started to really "hassle" the other fish to the point that I had to separate the 8 fry into 2 groups. I moved 4 to a 20 gallon tank with a matten filter and a 4"inch poret foam bottom filter. As it finally turned out there were 4 males and 4 females in the group. In the 20 gallon there ended up 3 males and 1 female. I guess around late December, the large male in the morning had a blue/white stripe running from the top of his head going down his back...but would disappear later on in the morning. Thought it might have been some sort of disease but it turns out that is an indication of spawning behavior. Both tanks were bare except for a small baseball size of java moss.

About 3 weeks ago I noticed some VERY small white dots in the java moss...ie: fungused eggs. So then started the egg collecting. Set up 5.5 gallon tank , temperature at 82-83 degrees and placed spawning mops with eggs into it. About a week later...fry! I am using Hikari "first bites" to feed the fry until they are large enough to consume live baby brine shrimp. I have tried to remove the eggs by hand and place them into floating container in the setup tank but have had very little success with that. Seems the removal of the spawning mops from the breeding tank with tank water and floating it in the hatching tank until temperatures have equalized..then placing the mop into the setup tank has produced the best results.

So far I have 4 hatching tanks...2 - 5.5 gallon and 2 10 gallon tanks. I need to make more mops today (lol).

Photo attached was taken last night of the "pig" male. Females are silver...with little or no color.

Congratulations on your success with M. herbertaxelrodi. How long did it take them to reach adult size and color up? Bet they love it in your very warm fishroom.

I raised up a small group of M. boesmani 'Uter' (maybe 8) and 13 Chilatherina campsi. Then I did a water change and forgot to plug the heater back in. The tank went down to 70F for about 2 days before I saw a dead fish, put my hand in the tank, and noticed the water was cold. Over the next few days, I lost all the M. boesmani and half the C. campsi. The remaining 7 C. campsi recovered fully and put on good growth, and were eventually sold at a mini-auction to free up some tank space for other projects.

I learned a lot from that experience of hatching the eggs. I'll never try to hatch them in a shoebox again. Now I have 4 small cube tanks (4.4g each) fitted with corner mattenfilters so I can turn the flow way down. I've been hatching out Enteromius hulstaerti (the African Butterfly Barb) in these with great success. Next time around with rainbow eggs this is the approach I would take.

I got some Melanotaenia parva as eggs and raised maybe 50 of them. I now have two batches of fry about half grown and about a fourth grown. These rainbows are red-orange rainbows and it seems both male and female can develop color. Females are best identified when they are full of eggs.