how do you breed egglayers?

I have tets but I'm not sure how to breed them

 

HI Sword. Which egglayers were you thinking in particular.

One obvious thing they all have in common is egg predators (well, the fact that you need to get egg predators away from where the eggs are).

Also, you'll need some methylene blue to prevent eggs going bad with fungus.

For the rest, I think it's really species-specific, like providing the right surface that the species would normally lay their eggs on, 'faking' the breeding season with rain/temperature effects, etc.

 

I agree with Armadillo about it depending on the species.

With Danio we put a school in a 10 gallon for a week (I know that is overstocked, but if it is a breeding tank only for a week, with good filtration that is fine) with only about 1/3rd the tank with water and heavily planted with a fine gravel substrate.

With stuff like Angelfish they need a surface to methodically lay the eggs (tank's glass, leaves of plants, wood, pots, etc)

With stuff like tetras I would suggest the method we used for our Danio Kerri. They are both egg scatterers, so the first method would work wonderfully.

 

I have neon, glowlights and especially head and tail light or gold tets-which they don't sell any more
how would I know when theyre ready to spawn?

 

Nearly every fish has a "spawning dance." With tetras they get side by side and their entire body will shake. It will look like they are severely shivering. If enough attention is paid to the event you can even watch the eggs drop. (we watched our mahachaI bettas drop eggs, it is neat.)

Marbles or gravel substrate is awesome for this purpose. (Some eggs get between the pieces of substrate so that the adults can't get them.)

Best of luck, and as always we'll be here to answer anything we can.

(With tetras, if you took them back out after just 2 days it would ensure they were back out before any fry were born.)

 

Unfortunatly, neons are one of the hardest tetras to breed. These fish you mentioned are egg scatterers, either take a barebottom tank and line the bottom with 2 layers of marble. 0r, place a fine (about 3-4 mm) net along the bottom of the tank, about 1 inch from the very bottom (bare)
Place hornwort, anacharis or other decorations like spawning mops in the top to ensure their stresslevels stay minimal, the female will be stressed enough as is.

If you really want to breed egg scatterers, but want it to be easy try danios, all they need is a 10 gallon+ rubbermaid container filled with a couple spawning rugs and mops.

Good luck!

 

Yarn tied around a cork or without the cork works well for spawning mops if you need to go cheap and easy.