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Has anyone ever seen a female Scarlet Badis?

At what age do they usually start to colour up like the images you typically see online? Also how long do they usually live?
 
Those pictures are great @MirandaB but mine are still only a few mm long, barely bigger than baby shrimp, so it's hard to make a comparison. I can't get pictures yet because they hide the minute the light comes on. I guess I'll just have to wait and see. I'm glad that I've got such a reliable source of freshwater rotifers from the microfex cultures though, hopefully I can get them big enough to seperate from the adults as I'd have no chance of catching them at the moment.
 
Love these little fish and reading about the hunt for the elusive females. Would love to try and get some for my nano I am setting up. How difficult are they to feed? Are they a purely live food only fish?
 
Love these little fish and reading about the hunt for the elusive females. Would love to try and get some for my nano I am setting up. How difficult are they to feed? Are they a purely live food only fish?
Depends who you ask and I'm guessing whether they are wild caught or not. I've seen reports of people even being able to gradually wean them onto flake foods but it seems to be very rare and they might actually just be seeing them take the occasional nibble and assuming they are subsisting on it when in fact they're mostly eating copepods and rotifers etc. that are present in the aquarium and they will also 100% eat snails and their eggs.
I've been able to get scarlet badis and dario hysignon to reliably take frozen copepods in the past without much effort and I'll be interested to see whether it might be easier to acclimate captive bred specimens to non live food than wild caught ones now that I seem to have some fry.
I wouldn't feel right about not offering them any live food at all though. Based on my experience I would think that a large enough densely planted tank without excessive filtration, any large predators, or UV sterilisers could possibly support a pair just with indiginous tiny arthropods that tend to be present in mature aquariums alongside a population of shrimp and snails but at the moment I culture a lot of different live food for them.
I've been having great success culturing some Crangonyx pseudogracillis that I got from @dw1305 . Given that only the babies are small enough to be eaten by scarlet badis I'm hoping soon to add them to the tank along with the cherries and amanos that are already in there - and that they'll be able to sustain themselves as an extra food source as they seem to breed faster than cherries. My cherry population is pretty stable even with a handful of micropredators in there so I've got high hopes for the crangonyx because they're also very entertaining to watch and some of them are a beautiful blue/green colour.
 
If anyone thinks they can reproduce then this might be helpful:

I've not ordered from this company before but before I was able to source my female from riverpark aquatics I was in contact with them and they did claim to be able to get female scarlet badis. I think it's entirely possible that they have actually made an effort to do so based on my harassment of them and that this listing is the real deal. I might even order a couple and see what turns up, I'd definitely say this is your best bet if anyone reading this is looking to get ahold of a female.
 
20210513_005522.jpg


Got a picture of my female while she was up against the front glass that shows the black bars that can be present on the females quite well, as well as the little flashes of blue iridescence that they can display.
It's actually incredible how quickly they can make these black bars appear and disappear to communicate with males and I wish I understood exactly how they do it. The only other animals I've seen change their colour and patterns this quickly are cephalopods like cuttlefish and octopuses.
It's tricky to catch on cemera because of how quickly they flash the stripes but they are capable of making them almost solid and darker than you see here. I snapped this picture on my phone and about a second later she was back to normal.
 
Depends who you ask and I'm guessing whether they are wild caught or not. I've seen reports of people even being able to gradually wean them onto flake foods but it seems to be very rare and they might actually just be seeing them take the occasional nibble and assuming they are subsisting on it when in fact they're mostly eating copepods and rotifers etc. that are present in the aquarium and they will also 100% eat snails and their eggs.
I've been able to get scarlet badis and dario hysignon to reliably take frozen copepods in the past without much effort and I'll be interested to see whether it might be easier to acclimate captive bred specimens to non live food than wild caught ones now that I seem to have some fry.
I wouldn't feel right about not offering them any live food at all though. Based on my experience I would think that a large enough densely planted tank without excessive filtration, any large predators, or UV sterilisers could possibly support a pair just with indiginous tiny arthropods that tend to be present in mature aquariums alongside a population of shrimp and snails but at the moment I culture a lot of different live food for them.
I've been having great success culturing some Crangonyx pseudogracillis that I got from @dw1305 . Given that only the babies are small enough to be eaten by scarlet badis I'm hoping soon to add them to the tank along with the cherries and amanos that are already in there - and that they'll be able to sustain themselves as an extra food source as they seem to breed faster than cherries. My cherry population is pretty stable even with a handful of micropredators in there so I've got high hopes for the crangonyx because they're also very entertaining to watch and some of them are a beautiful blue/green colour.
Thank you very much. I think I will have to hold off getting some then until I can find a space to keep a small live food farm. How do you keep your Crangonyx out of interest?
 
Viscum Water Gardens in Barnburgh, South Yorkshire have male and female scarlet badis for sale. The females were shipped in a separate bag and are displayed in a different tank. They are trying a new Indian supplier and currently have some unusual fish from the area.
 
Thank you very much. I think I will have to hold off getting some then until I can find a space to keep a small live food farm. How do you keep your Crangonyx out of interest?
I'm keeping them more or less the same way @dw1305 does in his buckets. I've got them in a plastic tub with java moss, some fallen beech leaves, a little bit of cuttlebone and some snails. I've tossed some algae from my vivarium in there as well as the odd bit of food I make for my shrimps and they seem to be thriving. Theres a few batches of babies scooting about anyway but @dw1305 was kind enough to send at least one berried female so they got off to a good start right off the bat.
Seems like you can basically just treat them as cherry shrimp.

As far as livefood farms go, a large bucket in the corner of a garden would be enough for a couple of badis if you did decide to go down that route. If the bucket is large enough even in winter up here in scotland you can remove the ice and there will still be huge numbers of daphnia etc. underneath. I've pulled a five inch thick slab of ice off the top of mine and still been able to harvest plenty before.
 
Hi all,

I was @louis_last's supplier and I keep them <"In my Asellus"> and Black worm (<"Lumbriculus">) buckets (below).

I've kept Crangonyx like this <"since 2016"> and Asellus and Lumbriculus for ~10 years without any problems.

hornwort_bucket-jpg.jpg


cheers Darrel

What do the Crangonyx typically eat in the aquarium Darrel, or do they only typically only survive in the culture environment?
 
I've got a lot more fry than I realised, I've been leaving the tank alone other than feeding but I weeded out some floaters today and there were loads of fry hanging out along the back wall that were just hard to see because of the black background.
Some of us have been discussing culturing microfex worms in another thread and one of the incredible things about the Russian method we've been shown is that it ends up being a co-culture of microfex and freshwater rotifers. I'm not an experienced fish breeder, but for anyone that already breeds small fish or is thinking about it, I can't possibly overstate how useful having one of these worm cultures on hand to extract rotifers is. I think there's a very strong case to be made that culturing these worms on sponge is probably also actually the best way to culture freshwater rotifers as culturing them in isolating can be a bit fiddly and prone to crashes.
The worms themselves are also an excellent feeder and after today I can also confirm that they survive in the aquarium - I moved a piece of moss that had just been sitting on the substrate and there were several of the worms in it.
HERE is a link to the Russian guy Alex that sells the worm cultures on ebay. They're listed as collection only because they're sensitive to shipping but he sent them by post to me and they survived just fine.
 
Here's a video of the rotifers I'm talking about. I can harvest this amount several times a day or as often as needed from a worm culture no larger than a thick book and all that's necessary to keep it going is to pour out and replace the water about once a week and sprinkle a little oat flour on top of the sponge.
Have you been taking advantage of this extra source of fry food from your microfex @MirandaB?
 
20210520_172930.jpg

This is the best picture I've been able to get of one of the fry so far but it's becoming easier as they are now free swimming. It's the tiny little thing above the ramshorn at the edge of the wood. The young growth of fissidens fontanus gives you some sense of scale and if you look closely you can see a tiny patch of the obscenely hard to source and ridiculously slow growing miniature Fissidens splachnabryoides around the Buce roots.
I'm guessing there's maybe 20 fry in there but it's hard to tell because I suspect most of them are hiding. The parents don't seem interested in eating them even when they're right in front of their faces but I'm not taking any chances and have been making various small livefoods abundantly available so if they're hungry there's always a slower moving moina or ceriodaphnia within reach.
My success here reflects how easy this species apparently is to breed rather than any expertise on my part so if anyone has any advice on rasing the fry it would be very welcome. I've managed to catch a few and move them into a seperate bare bottom container with tons of moss and floating plants but I'm leaving the bulk of them in the main tank for now. There's a lot of hiding places in there for them and I'm adding baby microworms and rotifers daily.
Otherwise I'm treating the tank pretty much the same as ever except I'm doing smaller water changes as I understand fry can be sensitive to that.
 
I'd carry on as you're doing @louis_last,they'll eat the various microfauna in the tank,microworms and rotifers then will move onto the bigger stuff pretty quickly.
I've been doing 50% water changes and not noticed any issues with the fry so far in regards to that.
 
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