Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Raising Forage and Bait Breeding FHM in an aquarium

Ive been reading pond boss forum for over six months now learning all kinds of things to make my pond better. I finally found a question/reason to post on the forum. So this going to be my first post on Pond Boss.

I have a 15 gallon aquarium that im wanting to breed a few FHM in. I spent about an hour looking around on the internet and youtube trying to find information about breeding FHM. I didnt find as much information as I would of liked. From the informantion I found was that the water temp needs to be in the right range for the FHM to breed and the female needed a place to put her eggs. Most of the information I found, were small school projects and other small experiments. Most of the information I read said put two males and 4 females into the tank give them the best possible enviroment to live in. (clean water, well feed, etc.) I have all of those factors accounted for. Most of the information I found said go buy a dozen minnows from a bait store, identify they are FHM and try and determine if they are male or female and then put them in the tank and hope for the best. The other information I read said to buy a 1 lb. or more of FHM and stock them into a large tank or small pond. Which isnt an option for me.

What im trying to get out of this is just to give the bass that are in my pond some small supplemental food. From what I read one female can produce 200-500 eggs. So i figure if I get 600-1000 eggs and 50% of those eggs survive to 1"-2" range that ill have a decent amount of extra food to feed to my bass. And the best case situation that will happen is all of the FHM I stock wont get eaten and may breed and keep a small supply of FHM in the pond. Not sure if that is possible sense all of the fry came from the same parents.

If anyone from the forum has done this I would love to hear about it. Also if there are any difficulties I havent learned about that I need to take into factor before doing this.

All of the help will be great.

Hey I tried to breed FHM in a 55 gal aquarium. They were in there for about a year with plenty caves and never spawned. I have bred cichlids in aquariums for years. I created the same conditions for the FHM that I would for cichlids. I know how to manipulate the water temp to trick them into spawning year round. And I got no results with FHM. Some fish will not mate in captivity. Unless my conditions were not suitable for an FHM spawn they probably wont mate in an aquarium, much less a 15 gal aquarium. 15 gallons doesn't leave any room for the fry to grow adequately. Keep in mind this will be hundreds of fry if they do reproduce

I failed in my attempt to do this as well, but I'm sure we have some experts here who have been successful at this. Or at least in some regard. I know in talking to Bill Cody he felt it was very possible to get spotfin shiners to breed in an aquarium setting. Either Cody or Travis would probably be your best bet for this information. I'm interested in this as well, but for other minnow species.

Sorry, that was a typo on the 15 gallon mine is a 55 as well.

I kind of figured this was going to be harder than the youtube videos put it out to be.

Cardell - not sure what cichlids are, I did a google search on them and they dont look like bait fish maybe im wrong.

Im willing to breed any kind of bait fish, just from what ive read FHM were suppose to be easy.

Im just looking for some supplemental food

Cichlids are a popular aquarium fish found in a lot of pet stores. Many different species and a lot of them get large and can be very colorful.

By the way, welcome to Pond Boss NE Bass. Whereabouts in Nebraska are you? Bet you can't tell where I'm from.

Omaha - im from Lincoln

Very cool! We have a few guys on here that are from Lincoln as well.

Lincoln here...welcome NE Bass. PM sometime, would be happy to help in any manner possible.

There you go NE Bass. Lincolnites unite! And TJ means it. He's helped me out immensely.

i've got a bunch of rosy red minnows (color morph of fathead minnows)
in a swimming pool in my basement, they've been breeding regularly in clay pots that i put in the pool.. when i started "testing" to see if i could do this, i pulled a pot out of the pool that had a bunch of eggs and put it in an established aquarium.. first try i didn't see any hatch.. second try i got the male that was taking care of the eggs (the male get's a "fat head" that he uses to keep the eggs clean)into the extra tank.. and had a successful hatch, but my greenwater culture wasn't established yet..
now that i have a couple more pieces of the puzzle figured out, i think i'll be able to breed rosy reds fairly easily indoors..i have tanks set up for daphnia as well as green water now..
working with glass shrimp, crayfish and scuds as well - scuds don't require anything special, and i've had lots of reproduction of them, but they are 1/2" or under

I had put some in a tank outside just to get it started and they were left over from fishing. I had put items in there but not luck. they chose to use the side of the tank instead. So I did have a few small fhm fry for a while but the one shiner and the Tilapia I had ate them up.

It's been my experience if you only feed flake food, it's tough to get them to spawn in an aquarium. However, if you feed them a mix of flake, frozen or live foods such as blood worms, glass worms, daphnia, etc they tend to do much better. Photoperiod, as in the length of light per day your fish are getting factors into it as well.

A couple years ago I put a dozen FM in a 8' dia kidde pool with a few pieces of scrap 2x4 floating inside. I fed them Game fish chow once a day. They did breed and I ended up with maybe a couple hundred fry. The fry grew slowly on the GFC and I had many die. They pecked away at the pellets with the adults but I don't think the feed gave them everything they needed. I probably would of had much better results with some feed made for fry but I just wanted to see if it would work. The experience I gained from it was that producing the fry was much easier than providing for them.

Well im going to give it a shot, Im gonna put as much area in my tank as I can for possible breeding areas and see what happens.

Im going to give them one month and if they dont breed use them for bait. Is one month long enought to determine if they are or are not going to breed?

Ive been feeding them flake for now but just picked up some Nutri Source® Catfish Diet Floating Fish Food. I read somewhere that a high protein diet is good for them.

You can crush it up as well to make it more fine, this helps them out. I did this with mine until they were larger.

Possibly some progress, I just recently put my aquarium lights onto a timer so they are off for 8 hours and on for 16 hours. I also began to feed high protein floating feed once a day and flake once a day. Also got my water temp to 73-74 and put some smaller pieces of plywood around in the tank. I had all of those factors going for two days now, Last night when feeding, I noticed a particular fish was guarding a rock heavily, every time another fish came close to his rock he would run them away. I’m assuming it’s a male beginning to get a nesting spot ready.

It's actually quite easy to raise FH minnows in aquaria. Water quality and food are key. Temp needs to be about 25°C and you need have flow through conditions or a good recirculating system. Live brine shrimp works much better than flake food or frozen protein. If you have small tanks (12-20 liters) I would use a ratio of 2 or 3 males and 5 or 6 females in each tank. For spawning substrates use 4" PVC cut in 4 inch sections, then cut again lengthwise to produce little huts in the tank. Three of these should do it. The fish will do best if they are 4-7 months old but that all depends on the temp and food they were raised on. Best lighting is probably 16 hours light/8 dark each day. If the fish are at stages where they mature, males and females are easy to tell apart and they will be eager to start breeding. If done right, you should have eggs within a few days of setting up.

(continued from previous post) Eggs will be deposited on the PVC substrates and are subject to fungal growth and death if not properly cared for. I wouldn't necessarily trust the fish to do this adequately, especially in a small tank. Eggs are often eaten by the fish. So the best option is to check the substrates for eggs every day and remove ones with large spawns on them. I like to move these to another tank and elevate the substrate (eggs attached) off the bottom of the tank on to a false floor of some kind. A screen propped of the bottom a couple inches works well. Set the PVC on end, on top of the screen. I would add aeration directly under the PVC to keep debris, etc... from settling on them which can lead to the fungus problem. You'll need to keep good water quality here as well and can start feeding crushed flakes or young brine shrimp when they hatch. I'm sure other methods work well too, but this one is proven to me.

im getting a lot foam on top of the water, ive never seen this before, any ideas?

You need more filtration. I'm guessing it's proteins.

This is fine, it's caused by nutrients being stirred up in the water

Get a foam fractionator. I'll send you one for free if you pay shipping.

Or do 10% water changes every day.

update, Ive got a filter running in the 55 gallon aquarium a heating unit that keeps it at 73-74, I completly re-did the setup in the tank due to zero results. I removed all of the plywood and most of the rocks. I then added six PVC huts and a few random rocks, I also stopped feeding them flake and pellet food and switched them over to small river shrimp (dead) and meal worms (dead)which I bought at a pet store, they came in small can, kind of like cat food. The FHM have no problem eating those up.

Within the first few hours it appears from my identifying skills that I have three males and a dozen females. The males each have there own specific pvc hut they hide in most of the day and only go out and snag some food when they feel its safe or something. Im going on 24hours of this new set up, seems like its going ok. Im hopping to see some eggs soon tho, or these FHM are going to become bait.

If anything interesting happens ill post it.