Hi Gill, thanks for your comments and glad to see you are back again and on this thread as well - you might be able to jump in with some advice based on your experience of keeping pipefish!Congrats on keeping these amazing fish, they are a joy to watch. And wow babies aswell, so lucky. .
Glassworms are their staple diet. I always go to the LFS on the afternoon they arrive. I do worry what will happen if they are not in stock one day - or, imagine, no longer supplied. ADC is the only shop I know in London that sells them. As you may have read, I enrich the brineshrimp with a vitamin supplement;I have also found that they Devour Glassworms with vigour, And Your choice of live food is the best on the market. Thinking of keeping these in the future once live foods are stable and in large quantities.
To try and make sure the vitamins get into the glassworm, I drain them and soak them in the vitamin liquid for a few hours. What is really frustrating is that quite often the majority of glassworms float (alive) on the surface. They don't sink and will just stay there until they die, out of reach of the pipefish. Sometimes they all float, sometimes they nearly all sink. I wonder if anyone else has any experience with this and knows a trick to make them sink?
Thanks BigTom. I have been using Google translate to try and read a couple of German accounts of breeding this fish. I have read 11 days, 3 weeks and 'several months' as time it takes for young fry to be released from the male's pouch. If it's 11 days, it could be any time soon, let's wait and see.Great job getting the pipefish breeding again. This is another group that are very high on my must have list for when I'm a bit more settled, so watching this thread with great interest!
Keeping these fish is quite intensive business, keeping up with the feeding regime. Feeding them also costs me at least £5 a week - that's £250 a year. I spend more time on the plastic crate containing the pipefish than I do on my main tank! Plus most of the time you can't even see them lol. "Why do I bother??" is a comment I hear regularly from people. Sometimes I wonder ...