Zebra Fish Breeding
Nature has lot of surprises for you and me.
I was trying to raise a Guppy fish with swordtail for ages.
It was easy in good old days when the brood was wild.
They did not have the present sailtail then.
But with the breeding of exotic and the emergence of the sail-tail or sari-tail varieties of guppies one cannot find guppies with the narrow short dorsal end of the tail with a broader and longer ventral end.
I have been screening the tails of guppies and found one with the suggestion of a swordtail and I mixed that one with the wild (not really wild) looking with light featured female guppies but have no success yet.
They breed less in the glass tanks.
I am waiting for a miracle to happen.
But toady, I was doing my daily routine of mixing different batches of guppies to interbreed and quite casually looked at the fortuitous zebra breeding tank to see whether the water quality was OK.
This plastic kitchen sink type of container was designed to put zebras to lay eggs and in my opinion it was not ready yet to put the adults. But as a conditioning routine I load it with the first portion of outlet water bucket from my main tank with zebras. Idea was to build the infusoria for the young ones, if they lay eggs by any chance. These eggs are very small and not visible to the naked eye. Most of it is eaten by the adult males and adult males are necessary for the fertilization of eggs. They lay over 400 to 1000 eggs but rarely a few survives in the tank. By removing water at the bottom by siphoning, I expect few eggs by chance to remain trapped with fortuitous black fungus (which appear like a tuft of leaves when fully grown).
Fish do not eat this black fungus probably it has nasty taste or alelopathic chemical.Then in the main tank to clown fish do the cleaning up of the eggs no sooner they are laid. I have been doing this religiously for the last one year but without any luck.
My first batch of zebra (breeding) was discovered accidentally in a bucket with water plants left to nature.
I had about 20 odd young ones and introduced 16 to the main tank leaving behind only four in the original bucket. That was a shear intelligent decision the ones introduced to the tank (fairly big) were eaten by the adult in one night.
They are very good at population control of their kind.
I wonder how they survive in the nature.
Probably the adult die soon after breeding with endemic parasitic diseases.
To my surprise there were six young one in the plastic container that survived the natural population control. Now I cannot put siphoned water to this tank for at least six months since they (young zebras) will eat all the eggs. I have to leave them in series of buckets and I have no room in my rooftop garden for any more buckets. So my zebra breeding will have to be done on makeshift containers. I cannot put the six young zebra fish to the main tank with zebras (they will be eaten) or to the other tank with live bearers. Young zebras will eat all the live-bearers’ young ones.
It is a paradox and reproducing nature is only an ad hoc experiment.
In a different note, I have a fabricated rainfall detector (modified fish tank) and it recorded half an inch of rain for the last one week. That I think is 25% of the usual rainfall and my predictions are we will have a drought by next April.
