After just 20 days, our female Melanochromis Auratus (Golden Mbuna) spit her fry in the 40 gal. breeder she was holding in. This is definitely her first little batch to survive. We raised her from a wee little one.
It is very hard to tell whether there are ten surviving fry or not. We removed the female, did a big water change, and have been feeding fry on baby brine shrimp several times each day. They are a bit of a challenge to count. It is fascinating to observe how they immediately claim and vigorously defend territory already -- at just days old.
If ten survive, we will submit for BAP points, post a spawning report, and include a video journal -- now long in the making . . .
Here's a video capturing these little guys:
Followup to this post: We are really happy to have counted _at least_ 11 Auratus fry. They feed nicely on BBS and some powdered spirulina. Now to convince some PVAS member to set up a Golden Mbuna tank to feature the whole lot of them!
Maybe like this:
Great help! Thanks. That all makes good sense. It small tanks, we have worked through Cyanobacteria by just drawing it out before and then water changing. Too long of a photo period makes a lot of sense!
Why won't fry cooperate and line up in military formation to be counted? Best of luck growing them out.
I have cyanobacteria in about a third of my tanks and have done a fairly exhaustive review of the available scientific literature. Cyanobacteria is ubiquitous in the environment (soil, airborne, municipal water systems, etc.) so don't waste anytime figuring out where it came from. Every time, a person, dog or cat walks into the house, every time a window is opened, or a water tap turned on, cyanobacteria is entering the home.
There is a tremendous amount of bad information floating around the fish forums about the conditions that favor cyanobacteria. The majority of that bad information originates from what is known about pelagic cyano which occurs in stagnant lakes. The cyano we typically get in our aquaria is benthic (hugging the substrate and other surfaces). In nature, benthic cyano thrives in high flow environments such as fast-moving rivers. Cyano feeds on the same nutrients that aquatic algae and plants do. Just keep your tank clean, and keep nutrients low in in an unplanted tank, and at optimal levels for plants in a planted tank. Ignore all the advice about limiting certain nutrients. Likewise, assuming you already have good flow in your tank, ignore all the advice about increasing flow.
As you may already know, erythromycin will wipe out your denitrifying filter bacteria. Another way to control cyanobacteria that is somewhat less disruptive to the aquarium is to dose the tank with hydrogen peroxide. A good dose that will set back the cyano without killing all the zooplankton is 1.5 ml 3% solution (what you buy at the drug store) per 10 gallons. Hydrogen peroxide will also neutralize the cyanotoxins (clouds that look like spores when you disturb the cyano mats).
Other than that, it's often useful to play with the light levels, length of the photoperiod, and wavelengths of light (too much light in the yellow part of the spectrum isn't used by plants but can be utilized by cyano). One of the reasons hobbyists are having much more trouble with cyano these days is because we have way too much light on our tanks. One of these days I'll get around to summarizing all this research into an article.
Hope this helps.