I have mentioned in random threads i have been trying to spawn bluegill indoors in my 100 gallon aquarium since january.
I thought i had 1 "male" and 3 "females" in the tank but a week ago i saw the largest "female" trying to make a second nest and seemed to be courting the "2nd largest female"... So i removed the "male" from the aquarium and sure enough the "largest female" moved into the big/main nest (there's only really room for 1 nest) and a week later i have bluegill eggs.
A couple of takeaways. Before i knew the "largest female" was in fact male, there was a lot of reason for me to think it was female. It generally had lighter colors. A significantly smaller and (to me) rounded ear tab. I witnessed it dancing with the "male" in the nest on multiple occasions but never resulted in any eggs.
I find it interesting that the female didnt spawn with any male, The dominant one has been available since january. She waited for the opportunity to spawn with this specific male?
from here on out the "largest female" will now be referred to as the male.
The eggs do not look like i thought they would. In fact, yesterday i thought i had some sort of mold infection in the tank because it was just a translucent jellylike haze. But today, i can see some actual gnat sized creatures hopping around, especially when the male fans the eggs and kind of stirs them up. There's also some shiny spherical objects which i am not sure what they are.
Anyways. I think there are thousands of blue gill in this picture. I will update as they grow and this progresses.
Will you need, or do you have, some kind of bloom going on for these fry to feed on?
Excerpt from Robert Crais' "The Monkey's Raincoat:" "She took another microscopic bite of her sandwich, then pushed it away. Maybe she absorbed nutrients from her surroundings."
The water is way too clear to produce fry food. Without proper fry foods at the correct timing most all if not all fry will die after they absorb the final yolk deposit. If adults are left in the tank they will probably eat all the fry before they are 1" long. Great video footage.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 08/07/1309:06 PM.
aka Pond Doctor & Dr. Perca Read Pond Boss Magazine - America's Journal of Pond Management
I have already taken all of the BG out of the tank except the male. I will take him out once the fry start to swim.
I have no filtration in this indoor tank. It's circulated by air stones. I have a bag of substrate hanging in the far corner (under an air stone) for extra surface area. I vacuum the tank every few weeks at which time I do a 50-70% water change with my 1500 gallon outdoor aquaponics system. I just did this a week ago when i removed the original "male". The glass also gets bad brown algae buildup but i brush it off with a magnet brush every few days. The brushing causes the water to get cloudy for a a day then it all settles out. I dont remove the particles so they must still be in there somewhere. I didnt show the terra cotta pots but they are mostly covered with brown algae. I think there's more microbial life than at first glance.
I *did* have a good algae bloom in my outdoor 800 gallon ferrocement tank but my tilapia fry (look more like fingerlings now) took less than a week to filter most of it out. It still has a greenish tint so i added a couple of gallons to the indoor tank today to try to get some algae reproduction started.
I also have a clogging problem in one of my grow beds where the water stands above the substrate.. it has developed a thick moss covering along with snails and little tiny jumping insects. I scooped a couple of cups of that mess and added it to the aquarium as well. I dont expect the fry to be able to eat the insects, snails or moss right away, but there's a whole tiny ecosystem happening there.
With my tilapia fry i have kept hundreds alive in a 55 gallon aquariums off of pulverized fish food and algae wafers (the algae waffer breaks down and starts to come apart in very tiny pieces and they seem to be able to eat it) Granted the tilapia fry are probably 4 or 5 times bigger than these little guys so that doesnt mean i dont share your food concern.
Do you think they will eat yeast, like beer or bread yest? That's my plan b and might as well be a part of my plan a. Diversity is probably going to win here.
It has also occured to me.... the following products are intended for marine animals but they are tiny nutrients, does anyone think they would be helpful harmful to this freshwater aquarium?
I already have some SFBB frozen glass worms and brine shrimp for when they get a little bigger.
I am also considering buying a dapnia culture off ebay. I should have it going on all cylinders by the time that niche of food is needed. They are just so damned expensive and i have never been able to keep a culture going indefinitely.
Yah judging by the size of what i am seeing right now, even the smallest daphnia species is the same size or bigger than these larva.
I had been assuming the fry would be swimming after the egg sac was absorbed (like tilapia) but i read a little and it looks to not be the case. They actually filter feed in a larva state for a while. I havent really found a great resource that talks specifically about what each state does and how long it lasts but i am sure it's out there and i will find it.
In the meantime i hydrated 1/8 ounce of bread yeast and added it to the tank. It's a little cloudier than i meant for it to be, but i expect the yeast to stay suspended and i figure yeast is a better food source than nothing.
It's a lot more difficult to see now but it looks like there's more "shiny spheres" today than there were yeasterday.
get a couple of buckets of your ft water and put them in the sun, you'll have green water in no time.. for my minnow hatches, i just drained a liter out of the buckets and put it in the tank..then put a liter back from the ft into the bucket..i fed 2 55 gallon tanks daily with 2 buckets of green water.. when it started getting cold, i moved my buckets into the basement, added a few (i use kitty litter buckets), so i have 4, under a 4' flourescent light.. 2 of the buckets had the algae die off, but i restarted with what was still going.. after i got the greenwater started, i set up three 5 gallon tanks, seeded with ft water, added green water, they bloomed so i added a rotifer/copepod culture (and later gammarus) easy to suck some bugs and green water out with a turkey baster and feed to the fry... now all my glass tanks are full of marmokreb crayfish..
Yeast cells are too small for BG yolk fry to eat. Rotifers and cladoceran Crustracea eat yeast sized particles. BG fry first start eating larger algae cells and rotifers for about a week then switch to zooplankton - Cyclopoda and Cladocera.
aka Pond Doctor & Dr. Perca Read Pond Boss Magazine - America's Journal of Pond Management
djstauder, I think they are too little, i have been trying to think of a way to really show their size. Just know that in my picture you see gravel but you are looking at thousands of eggs/sack fry. I have to stare at it when several egg fry are moving AND at the right angle to see the an individual. They are about the thickness of a head hair and maybe 4-5 times longer than wide.
These larva havent even started swimming yet so i am not sure they are even at the stage in development that this picture shows.
keith, absolutely. I have started 12 mason jars with water from the 800 gallon tank. Just leaving them in the sun. The water already has a light green tint. I figure i can use two a day and do ~6 day cycle. I am just afraid it's going to be too late by the time the algae gets going good enough to make a difference.
Bill,
Thanks, I will stop murky-ing the water with yeast then. Tomorrow should be the third day so from what i have read they should finish absorbing their egg sack and start swimming? There's a fair amount of brown algae, will they peck it off the walls or should i brush it so the particles are suspended? When they get big enough to switch to zooplankton will i be able to switch them to grinded feed pellets? or should i be starting cultures now?
I'll keep doing small water changes with my outdoor systems 1500gallons and 800gallons to try and get by by until my algae blooms.
You've got me itching to try and spawn gills in a tank now next year. I think I can feed them with zooplankton I can feed green water to in another tank. Bill and I went to a seminar where a supplier out in California has the things needed to get them started.
I produce bluegill fry in a pond now but it's very labor intensive, lacks control, predator issues, and I end up with a lot less than originally hatched.
Last edited by Cecil Baird1; 08/09/1309:45 PM.
If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.
thanks for the feed back.. now only if i can keep them alive. I am trying to think of a way maybe to keep 100 alive cause in reality that is all i really need. I plant to grow them some to 2 years some to 3 year and some to 4 years. I expect at the two+ year mark i will be feading ~100 lbs of fish which is about the max i want to spend on feed lol.
What a BG swarm. This should really show folks just what we mean when we say prolific. You could have as many as 30,000 of them from this spawn. Nice work and great pics.
Yeast cells are too small for BG yolk fry to eat. Rotifers and cladoceran Crustracea eat yeast sized particles. BG fry first start eating larger algae cells and rotifers for about a week then switch to zooplankton - Cyclopoda and Cladocera.
Don't know if this makes sense, but if rotifers eat yeast cells, and the yolk fry eat rotifers, would it still be good to add yeast to feed the rotifers so they do well, and in turn help the yolk fry?
Much the same concept as I've read on here about grinding up feed to help the fry in your pond, which then feeds the bigger fish.
I think the algae is ingested as incidental items along with primary food such as large protozoa and rotifers. They can grow quickly so they do not stay eating each size item for very long. Some fry species have a difficult time inflating the air bladder if conditions are not correct thus mortality can be very high at this time period.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 08/09/1311:11 AM.
aka Pond Doctor & Dr. Perca Read Pond Boss Magazine - America's Journal of Pond Management
I removed the male this morning so now there is only fry in the aquarium. His job was done.
There's a few dead fry carcasses floating around but it looks in the numbers of a few dozen, not yet a mass dieoff.
I have a 600 gph pump in my outdoor 800 gallon tank with vinyl tubing running through my doggie door to the 100 gallon tank.
The elevation is that i can pump the tank aquarium full of pondlike water from the outdoor tank, then when i turn the pump off the water from the aquarium will siphon back to the outdoor tank.
inevitable i will be losing hundred maybe thousands of fry in the water changes but the main school is swimming against the current and i think this may be the only way to save a significant number.
My mason jars for algae cultures are still light green but noticeable darker than the first day. I may be able to start using them tomorrow.
It looks like all the fry are dead. definitely all of the ones in the fish tank. i was holding out hope that some had worked their way into one of my 300 gallon outdoor ibc tanks but after a week i expect them to be big enough to see them and i dont.
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