Raising Rainbows (Threadfin)

[Demeter]

I’ve never owned rainbow fish until I bought a group of 8 threadfin rainbows off ebay. Unfortunately all were male so I did some digging around and inquiring online before I eventually ended up finding 3 females at my local petstore. Snapped them right up for nearly the same price as my 8 males (yikes). After adding them in with the males it took ~2 weeks before they got busy and surprised me with little ones

I’ve raised bettas so they can’t be as hard as that right?

Side note: special thanks to Fishstery for a bit of experienced advice!

So far there looks to be about two dozen inside a breeder basket in the main tank. The spawn mop has more eggs on it so I’d expect more in the coming days. I’ve seen the fry pecking at HikarI first bites and micro worms so they’re probably eating enough.

Geek note:
1. Eggs are very sticky, trying to remove them from the mop with a pipette is near impossible as they stick to the end of the pipette via tiny adherent threads
2. Eggs are laid over the course of a few days so fry hatch out in batches
3. Males are quite gentle with the females so having more males than females doesn't seem to cause issues for this species.
4. I've been feeding grindal worms and BBS every couple days so perhaps this helped induce spawning.

 

[RobM]

1 You can just use your fingers. The eggs are fairly robust.
2 They generally spawn in the morning. Best time to check the mop is early afternoon, especially if there is anything in the tank that might eat them.

HikarI first bites may be a little large for newly hatched werneri. They usually need food in the 50-100 micron range. There is usually some infusoria floating around in a planted tank that will get them through to the bbs stage.

Great job! These are not the easiest of rainbows to raise in the early stage. Once they get to bbs you are usually in the clear.

 

[qldmick]

I don't know but I would of guessed rainbows needed infusoria, there's a few people breeding local variants in ponds in Australia.