Martinismommy

Is it normal for the fry to spend a lot of time at the bottom? I see some of the kids swimming near the top but a lot of them seem to stay at the bottom kind of scooting around...I'm also having a difficult time tell if they are eating the micro worms....I have a magnifying glass but everything is so darn tiny it's hard to see.....

Also, should I be syphoning the bottom?

lilFishyfish

Mine hung out at the bottom and at the top, as they got older they sorta started swimming around more. How small are yours? I had a hard time getting mine to eat Mirco worms, so I used tiny brine shrimp with eye dropper and just make sure not to get any of the floating eggs into the tank with the babies. (As they got older I switched them to frozen daphina, bloodworms, and pellets, it took awhile but they soon started eating pretty much anything!) One time I saw one of the "larger" mirco worms sorta looking like it was attacking one of the fry. I stopped using them after that and I contacted the guy I ordered from and he wouldn't asnwer me. As far as the siponing goes I used a TINY one, as soon as the fry are at the point where they are free swimming and eating well it should be fine to. I had a small outside side filter on my tank with fish net wrapped around the tube to keep the babies from getting sucked up. Also I used a piece of plastic around the water flow area to break up the water flow to keep it from being to strong of a current. I hope this helps! (Attached is pic you can see they just ate Brine shrimp and some are at the bottom.)

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Pandora

Yeah, they're not very strong swimmers right at first... and if you're feeding microworms the bottom is where all the food is!
If you can see white in their belly region, they're eating. It'll get much easier to see if they're eating or not once they're on the baby brine, since their stomachs will swell orange.
Is the bottom dirty? I've gotten a bit better at not making a huge mess when feeding tiny fry, but I used to have to siphon daily... I used a bit of airline tubing as a siphon... into something like a margarine container, and then every time it got half full pored over it with a flashlight to get all the fry out... and then dumped the water. It took a bit of time... I'm sure there's a better way to do it lol.

Fishies-for-me

What about using a turkey baster to target debris and emptying it into a dish to check for babies before dumping?? good luck.

Martinismommy

I tried the turkey baster and accidently fished out 7 of them! They are so darn tiny it is hard to see them with my poor eyesight...I put them back in and decided to leave things alone for now since it is heaily planted..