By Bobby Braley 

I obtained the young pair of fish from Kent and Rebecca on 11/19/2005 at our monthly meeting. At the time I hadn’t read about them or really heard of them, all that I had done was look at their picture when Kent posted them as available. I liked the look of them and decided that I would like to try my hand at keeping them.

I got the pair home and placed them in a 2 ½ gallon tank. I can’t tell you the water parameters other than it is from the tap to a 50 gallon barrel with amquel+ added and air and heat. Sometimes the water has had about 24 – 36 hours aging and other times it has aged for 4 – 5 days depending on how long it takes to empty the barrel with the water changes that I do. I change tank water on all my tanks every other day at the rate of 20% - 30%. I just believe that the changes are the important part rather than going nuts over the parameters. I may be proved wrong but I guess that it will be after all my fish die and John stops raising fish for the same reasons.

Okay off the soap box and on with “Fatboy’s Ijebu Ode Adventure”. Since I wasn’t sure if these guys were old enough to breed when I acquired them, I didn’t immediately put a mop or peat with them. I asked Kent and Rebecca and was told that they were of an age to do the wild thing and that they were mop spawners. I placed a floating mop (dark green) in the tank with them. The mop was just long enough to barely touch the bottom of the tank. I checked the mop a week later on 12/17/2005 and found three (3) eggs. Not knowing the correct thing to do, I placed them in peat. The following week I again checked the mop and there were no eggs. Another week passed and three (3) eggs were found on 12/31/2005. I also placed these in peat for incubation as well.

I read on a killietalk thread where one person recommended checking the mop daily. John also told me that he had heard of using rubber bands and dividing the mop into sections of about a third each (from top to bottom so that you have a couple of rounded sections and then the loose ends at the bottom. I figured that neither of these suggestions could hurt so I used the rubber bands to section the mop and started checking it each evening after arriving home form work (my wife Mary Kay has since taken over this treasure hunt from me). Well this seems to be the way to get eggs from the little guys. We started out slow getting 3 – 6 eggs a day which we placed in a container of water (read this on another board and some websites) for incubation. I noticed that most of the eggs were coming from the lower section of the mop and decided to make a longer mop (had to find a bigger book). The longer mop was made from dark brown yarn this time and about a 20% to 25% of it was actually lying on the tank bottom. This mop was checked on a daily basis as well and we pulled a total of 27 eggs during the week with the record being 11 eggs (from the long dark brown mop) in one day. This week was a combination of two different mops. Again the majority of the eggs were in the bottom third of the mops. These 27 eggs were placed one to a cube in ice trays for water incubation on 12/08/2006.

We then made a mop that was in between the other two in length and was made from the dark green yarn. This mop has been in use for the last week and has been checked daily. The egg count so far is 31 with one more day to go for a full week.

I plan on going back to the long dark brown mop and see if this makes any difference in the egg production from these guys. I also plan to make a mop of the same length from the dark green yarn and use it for a test to see if the color could also have something to do with the egg production.

As a side note I placed the bags of peat that each contained 3 eggs in water on 01/07/2006 since I had also read that the incubation time on these guys was around 14 days and that peat shouldn’t be used because of the fast development time. On 01/12/2006 one (1) egg had hatched (man these guys look little) I can only guess that it came from one of the three eggs collected on 12/17/2005.

I know that this rambles on a good bit and I will try to do better as I put up further post on these guys. Maybe this will help someone else looking to keep these guys and give them success a little faster. It never hurts to learn from your mistakes but it is always nice to get good advice from your friends and fellow killi keepers. Thanks to Kent, Rebecca and John for their advise guidance and general ability to put up with me.