Sunday 26 February 2012

All grown up

Well, the oldest babies are now grown up!  Some of them are already starting to have babies of their own - they are obviously very happy in their new home!  Congratulations Lizz!

Those that are still with me at the moment are just getting more beautiful every day.  I can spend hours just watching them.  The boys are the funniest, flirting and dancing with each other all the time!



We had another brood born this morning.  Its so weird comparing them to the 6 week olds, who in turn seem incredibly small compared to the 6 month olds.  I always forget how small and vulnerable newborns are, and  it also always surprised me how quickly the males are eager to get pregnant again.  Within minutes of being reunited with his mate, my male was flirting again and this was perhaps not even an hour after delivering the last of the babies.  





I'm in the process of moving the 6 week olds over to frozen at the moment.  This is perhaps the most frustrating phase with fry as sometimes it just seems like they are never going to make the transition.  I'm quite lucky with this brood though and I would say that perhaps 50 % of them are now starting to eat adult brine shrimp.  Strangely enough, it seems to be the smaller ones that are most enthusiastic.

Monday 13 February 2012

Surprise!!!

Last night, after finishing all of the water changes, feeding, brineshrimp preparation, etc I decided to remove some of the water from the adults tank as I wasn't happy with the surface agitation.

I looked down into the bucket and what did I find?  A baby seahorse! Aaaaaagh!  And I thought my boys were taking a pregnancy break too!  I honestly have no idea where, or should I say who, this little fella came from.  None of my boys looked particularly pregnant yesterday and still don't today so its a little bit of a mystery.

I've added the new little one in with the last brood and am hoping that he will be the only one that I find as I don't really like to mix broods.  I love seahorse babies but I am running out of room and so the idea of the boys having a bit of a break is very welcome!

I will let you know if I find more this evening.

Sunday 5 February 2012

No news is good news!

Just a quick update today as I really don't have much to report on and I want to work on a couple of articles.  Everyone's doing rather well at the moment and I even saw some of the three week olds eat a little frozen yesterday so that's a really great sign.  The first two pictures here show the nice red digestive tract of the fry, which shows that they are eating lots.



Over the last couple of days we've had a fairly significant die off from the 1 week olds and this is most likely to be nutritional.  I would expect that most of them weren't eating in the first few days and this has had a detrimental effect on their development.  That said, we still have a bucket load (excuse the pun) that seem to be doing OK.  The only thing I'm a little worried about is that because they are in the bucket, I can't really monitor their food intake so much.  I'll see how these guys pan out, but my priority is the 3 week olds right now.  However, I am really interested to see how they do in the bucket as I do hope to move over to a circular system in the near(ish) future.




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