On some of the dangers involved in being a baby Trauermantelsalmler

We have babies!

Fish babies! 😉

(Can you tell I’m excited yet?)

At least 3 of them! (From approximately 500 eggs, according to the fish website I consulted)

Totally unexpected too…

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On Tuesday I came back from England. I was there for a week and had been travelling in Germany for a few days before that.

It’s amazing what changes in a couple of weeks. My baby catfish are almost double the size they were when I left (:)) and the discus we quarantined died just before I got back (:(). The plants are threatening to turn into triffids (:/) and the duckweed layer was thick enough to block out most of the light.

This evening I finally got my act in gear and skimmed the duckweed off the top of the water in the big aquarium. I was planning to change the water and suck up all the algae from the bottom of the aquarium too, until DB said he’d prefer it if I cropped some pictures ready for printing on a T-shirt for a friend of his. I was almost finished with the duckweed anyway, so I stopped and decided to carry on with the algae tomorrow – one day more or less is no big deal… This algae grows faster than I can get it out, and collects in dust-bunny-like clumps. I don’t even know what kind of algae it is, but it’s how I imagine underwater tumbleweed..

Before I headed upstairs to the computer, I sat back to admire the light reaching all the way down to the pebbles for the first time in ages – and something tiny moved… We don’t have anything tiny living in there so I looked more closely – and there swam a very (VERY) small, VERY cute, perfectly formed, baby Trauermantelsalmler fish :). Not much longer than 4mm and a whole lot thinner. Then it was gone, hidden in a mess of long wavey ‘grass’ and tumbleweed. Then there was another one, smaller than the first, but still identifiable as a TMS, followed by a third. What a good thing I didn’t change the water!

I don’t know how long they’ll last since ALL the other fish (including the parents) are hungry savages when it comes to tiny baby fish (cuteness doesn’t get them anywhere; they’re better off swimming fast and hiding well) but I’m pretty sure there’s at least 3 which have made it this far (something like 8 days judging by the size) so we’ll see. Wish them luck 🙂

***

WHOOO!!!

0 thoughts on “On some of the dangers involved in being a baby Trauermantelsalmler

  1. Let’s hope no one in there is hungry at all and has a long sleep until the babies are able to fend for themselves. How long until they would be fully grown?Good luck little fishies!

    1. 🙂 That would be great 🙂
      I have no idea how long it takes to be fully grown, various websites say anything from 3 months to 2years. Depending on source, ‘fully grown’ is anywhere between 5 and 6.5 cm long – ours are maybe 4cm atm, so I’m pretty sure not even the parents have actually finished growing yet. Apparently they are usually sold at about 3 months old, which would make ours about 4 months old now, except that would make it unlikely that they laid eggs at all, since they’re supposed to be at least a year old (better 2)… I imagine it would take about a month (maybe 6 weeks) for them to be big enough not to be lunch, but I have no evidence or experience or even a decent amount of reliable reading matter to base that on….

    1. Yes, they’re from south America (Amazonas) There’s a lot of information about them out there, it just doesn’t seem to be talking about the same fish (5cm v 6.5cm long; easy v hard to look after; max. 26’C v max 28’C… etc) and if they do tell you anything about breeding, they don’t mention how quickly they grow. I asked the lady in the fish shop and she said it depends how much they eat… which is probably true, but not really helpful 🙁 Still, there are at least 4 still swimming around, so maybe they do stand half a chance 🙂

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