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pipefish B&B

Congrats on keeping these amazing fish, they are a joy to watch. And wow babies aswell, so lucky. .
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!
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.
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;
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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?

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!
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.
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:woot:. 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 :lol:...
 
"Why do I bother??" is a comment I hear regularly from people. Sometimes I wonder ...
Because you care :p and its a great challenge ;)
 
If You ever get stuck for live food, Roxanne has a contract with that live food company >> 20 X Bags of Live Fish Food - Bloodworm Daphnia Brine Shrimp Tubifex - OFFER!! | eBay
Cheers Gill for the link. Do you know if they would be available in smaller quantities? It would take me 3-4 weeks to go through twenty bags and they won't last that long.
 
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?

I've not fed glassworms, but have found that daphnia often get stuck on the surface.
I think it is from air getting trapped in them when they hit the surface of the water. I get around it by putting the bag they are in underwater before opening it. Works for me. The downside of this is that you end up using the water they come with, which is not desirable.
 
Good news first. You may remember that I posted a few weeks' ago about finding pipefish eggs on the bottom of my tank;
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example of one of the eggs

I am pleased to say that the mating attempt has obviously been successful as I have spotted more pipefish fry!
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In the post referred to above, I reported that there was very little information available about how long the males carried the eggs inside their pouch and that the few accounts I had read were conflicting; citing 11 days, 3 weeks and 'several months'. I was lucky to have found the eggs that had spilled over from the mating attempt (they were eaten by snails within minutes of me spotting them), especially so that I can exclusively reveal here on ukaps :lol: how long the 'gestation period' really is; about 17 days.

Unfortunately, this is still an estimate. Although I know the exact day the mating took place, I do not know when the fry were 'born' from their dad's pouch. Every day, I have been spending some time looking for any signs of fry but with all the extra ferns and moss I added to the tank, they are very hard to spot, literally like needles in a haystack;). By comparing to the sizes from the last batch, I reckon they are about five days old, so 16-18 days seems a very realistic estimate.

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It is very hard to estimate how many there are. I counted four this evening.

The bad news; I found a number of dead fry inside the Aqua Flow 100 filter fitted on inside of the tank. I felt really bad as I could have prevented this but thought that the filter would not be strong enough to suck them in and also thought that they could not get in anyway as the sponge bit sits directly against the filter opening. I was wrong and found another four dead ones inside. Also, I have not seen the only surviving youngster from the first batch since my last report of him. I assume he might have got stuck/ burned between the heater and its casing, or also disappeared into the filter.

Anyway, lessons learned for next time. I have removed the heater casing and have placed some stocking around the intake of the filter to prevent fry from being sucked in. I will also take up Darrell's suggestion of running a sponge filter as well to increase surface areas for micro organisms to live on. I have also got a vinegar eal culture going to help feed the fry, and over the weekend will start up banana worm and micro worm cultures also. Hopefully I can bring on some of these little ones this time...

I made another interesting observation on the same day I spotted the fry.
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One of the pipefish has a definite 'bulge'.

The Japanese website I referred to in my previous post showed pictures of a female dropping eggs and a male receiving eggs into his pouch (left and right below). The colouration of my pipefish and the position of its 'bulge' in relation to its dorsal fin suggests, I think, that the above picture is of my female - possibly with more eggs??
malefemalepipefish.jpg

Maybe this is wishful thinking and I am interpreting the above pics in the wrong way. Compare the position of the 'bulge' of my fish in the middle with that of a female on the left and male on the right.

Anyway, for now it looks like my pipefish couple have a real good thing going on. Which brings me to my final point - I am aware this is the UK Aquatic PLANT Society and so far this journal has just been about breeding FISH in a PLASTIC CRATE:lol: .

I really need to get a move on with sorting out their proper tank. No progress here I am afraid. It has all been a bit back to front with this project.
 
Use a sponge filter for tanks with tiny fry in. They are cheap, ugly, but very effective for this purpose. TA aquaculture sell a variety of sponge filter options, you just need to purchase a pump elsewhere. Having used many different makes over some years for fry rearing, I personally find eheims better made, more efficient on power.
 
Very interesting journal, killi69. Those pipefish are very beautiful and such an exciting breeding behaviour. I was not aware that any freshwater fish used this breeding technique. Good luck with them and I'm looking forward to see them in a nice planted tank.:)
 
Mate is be well pleased!! I got all happy when I see one of my shrimp berried haha let alone pipefish eggs! Haha

Baby pipefish is looking really good too, nice markings.

Keep it up mate
 
Use a sponge filter for tanks with tiny fry in. They are cheap, ugly, but very effective for this purpose. TA aquaculture sell a variety of sponge filter options, you just need to purchase a pump elsewhere. Having used many different makes over some years for fry rearing, I personally find eheims better made, more efficient on power.
Thanks Sanj. I already have a few sponge filters from TA Aquaculture. Great supliers, I can recommend them also. I use them for dried granular foods and everything for needed for growing brineshrimp.
Very interesting journal, killi69. Those pipefish are very beautiful and such an exciting breeding behaviour. I was not aware that any freshwater fish used this breeding technique. Good luck with them and I'm looking forward to see them in a nice planted tank.
Cheers JEK, I really need to make progress with getting the aquarium planted up. Even when it has been set up, I will wait for a while until it has matured, so it will be months before the pipefish leave their crate.
Great journal andre, i for one look forward to updates as id love to do something like this, but alas there's no way id have the patience or dedication needed! Very happy to do it vicariously
Now you have sold your tank, you might have some spare time on your hands:lol:
Mate is be well pleased!! I got all happy when I see one of my shrimp berried haha let alone pipefish eggs! Haha Baby pipefish is looking really good too, nice markings. Keep it up mate
It was great to find the fry. Downside is that they mainly eat newly hatched brineshrimp, which only live in freshwater for a few hours, so they really must be fed twice a day. The adults would be ok with feeding once a day as a lot of the food they eat (glassworm, daphnia, small bloodworm) stays alive in the tank. It just means that for the next couple of months it will be difficult for me to stay away for the night:crazy:.
Funny enough, I have not seen my sakora shrimp berried up yet. Perhaps they are not old enough or could it be that their food supply is too rich in protein? One of the main reasons I have them is to help clear up the left over brineshrimp and, once they do multiply, provide an occasional shrimplet snack for the pipefish.

Baby pipefish are doing well, I counted five this morning among all the plants so there must be a few more in there.
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Now you have sold your tank, you might have some spare time on your hands
dont think so andre, new tank arrives straight after my holiday :D
if you can get a good survival rate you'll have pipefish coming out of your ears in no time at this rate of breeding.
 
Cheers Darrel, I picked up a mature culture last week. Not sure how to catch the eels though. When I had them years ago, I would get little dots/ tiny balls of eels floating near the top and I would just suck up those with as little liquid as possible and squirt straight into my containers with fry. The culture I have now has loads of eels but they are more spread out and need to be strained. I used to use coffee filters, is this the best method? From what I remember, the sour liquid from the culture would still enter the water via the coffee filter paper. What would you recommend?

Also, would the eels sink of float towards the top? The baby pipefish hang out towards the bottom.
 
Hi all,
Not sure how to catch the eels though.
Use this method, from <Vinegar Eels>, much easier than anything else.
A modified technique using the same theme but productive enough to be useful is to use longneck bottles for culturing. Keep the culture medium level well below the neck to have adequate surface area. To harvest, remove the floss plug and add enough spare culture medium to reach above the bottom of the narrow neck. Push the polyester filter floss down to the surface. Add fresh water up to the top of the neck. In a few hours (or overnight), there will be a rich collection of eels in the fresh water, but no noticeable mixing from the vinegar below. Collect the worms with a bulb baster or dropper. Remove the floss and squeeze dry. Pour enough vinegar back into a spare bottle to get good surface area again in the main culture bottle and loosely plug the top of the neck with the damp floss.
Also, would the eels sink of float towards the top? The baby pipefish hang out towards the bottom.
They swim towards the light like BBS, but you can concentrate them lower down with an LED at night etc.

Banana or Micro- worms last quite well in water, and they eventually sink to the bottom.

cheers Darrel
 
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