Keep your chin up. It takes time to get it down to a science. I have to give you major props for tank breeding one of our endangered species! Awesome in what you are doing.
When I bred them I attempted to follow this procedure I had read years back and it worked good.
- If you have the male in a breeder, remove the male back to the main tank once the fry have been released. The fry will look almost identical to their parents—just way smaller.
- Because the fry are immediately capable of eating, start an intensive feeding regimen of nauplii—the larval stage of brine shrimp (Artemia salina)—and microscopic aquatic animals known as Rotifera (more on these in a later article). Copepods make another good food source for the fry. Start with small amounts of prepared foods and frozen foods as soon as they will take them.
- During this period, some of the fry will grow faster than others, and these larger fish will eat the majority of the food (to the point of chasing the smaller ones away). For this reason, some aquarists spilt the fry into separate like-sized groupings at this point.
- Depending upon your tank inhabitants, reintroduce the surviving young Banggai Cardinalfish to your main tank. As juveniles that should form a tight protective grouping and there shouldn’t be undue interspecies aggression. As they get older, however, you will need to separate out the young adults—consider giving them to friends or even selling them back to the local fish store for store credit.
*good luck and I admire your efforts to keep wild ones where they belong instead of becoming extinct.
