[Killietalk] RE: Killietalk Digest, Vol 4, Issue 18

["Koran, David HQ02" <David_Koran at HQ02.USACE.ARMY.MIL>]

RE:  Cubanichthys pengelleyi

Included are a few observations I have made with this fish.

I found the adults and young adults to be especially skittish and lost
several adults I had obtained over a 5 year period before having my first
success.  In the last couple of years I have been at two shows where a pair
of Cub. pengelleyi where exhibited and one of the fish in perfectly good
health died in a bare tank.

They are extremely prolific.  During the summer of '02 I had a pair in my
greenhouse and spawned them over mops where I picked eggs almost on a daily
basis.  By fall I had brought indoors about 700 young fish (5+ weeks of age
when moved).  Because I only collect eggs into one petri dish a night there
were instances when there were so many eggs that some might have gone bad
quickly and I lost the entire dish, hence, I might have easily picked over
2000 eggs from the pair.  While I didn't monitor temperture like I did this
summer I would say the best results were obtained when the temperature was
in the upper 70's.  The adults were finally moved indoors when the water
temperatures were in the 50's.  Although I use two mops in every breeding
tank, unlike pupfish where the top mop usually has much fewer eggs because
females take cover in the mop and have a ready food source (ah caviar!!) in
the top mop, I used two small mops and each one had significant numbers of
eggs whenever I harvested eggs.  They also didn't seem to have a color
preferrance in mop yarn.

Although I changed water on newly hatched fry and young fish about once a
week, that process slowed to every other week after 5 weeks, once every 3
weeks after about 3 months and then once every two months.  They are
tolerant of poor water conditions but this is mostly if you maintain them in
hard water which tends to not go acidic as rapidly as soft water.  "Dirty
water" (Katz) is a relative term--it needs to get pretty dirty until you
start losing them.  They will crowd well! (I have over 80 fish in a 7 gallon
rubbermaid basin with a sponge filter and I lose more fish when I change
water (diving under the sponge filter) then due to bad water conditions).

I think the biggest problem with these fish is that they are so tolerant of
bad conditions that we tend to ignore them and miss the slight signs they
are under stress so that when the conditions go past the breaking point we
get massive losses and have difficulty saving the batch.

Dave Koran

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