My DPs had babies!
Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 11:07 am
So last night I was feeding my DPs their usual meal of frozen bloodworms when I noticed this little speck floating around the tank (I turn the filter off when I feed so the food doesn't get sucked up). But it seemed to be doing more than just floating -- it was SWIMMING. I put my glasses on and really stared, and the speck appears to be fish-shaped. A baby DP!
I know the baby doesn't stand a chance in a heavily filtered tank full of 5 hungry almost-grown dwarf puffers. So I set up a small 2 gallon tank in the kitchen and spent half an hour trying to find Baby again (looking for something the size of a pinhead in a 29 gallon heavily decorated tank was HARD). Finally found him sitting on a plant leaf, and transferred him to the QT tank. I removed all the decor from the big tank and spent an hour searching for more babies, but it seems that if there were any, they were most likely eaten or sucked into the filter.
So, my questions: My large female was looking incredibly round last week -- is it safe to assume that she was full of eggs? Will DPs eat their own eggs the way goldfish do? Would I have been able to actually see the eggs if I had known what to look for?
I can't get over how tiny this little baby is. I'm serious when I say pinhead-sized. I know that the fry of just about any fish are incredibly fragile, so I'm not getting my hopes up that I can successfully raise this one lone baby DP. But I'm going to try!
I know the baby doesn't stand a chance in a heavily filtered tank full of 5 hungry almost-grown dwarf puffers. So I set up a small 2 gallon tank in the kitchen and spent half an hour trying to find Baby again (looking for something the size of a pinhead in a 29 gallon heavily decorated tank was HARD). Finally found him sitting on a plant leaf, and transferred him to the QT tank. I removed all the decor from the big tank and spent an hour searching for more babies, but it seems that if there were any, they were most likely eaten or sucked into the filter.
So, my questions: My large female was looking incredibly round last week -- is it safe to assume that she was full of eggs? Will DPs eat their own eggs the way goldfish do? Would I have been able to actually see the eggs if I had known what to look for?
I can't get over how tiny this little baby is. I'm serious when I say pinhead-sized. I know that the fry of just about any fish are incredibly fragile, so I'm not getting my hopes up that I can successfully raise this one lone baby DP. But I'm going to try!
