I found that even with wild stock the success rate was very low. My initial
wild stock consisted of 2 males and five females and the number of eggs
collected over the first 3 weeks was 180. Of these only 79 hatched - a mere
43%. The problem I find is similiar to Peters in that getting eggs is not
the problem getting them to hatch is! I find that many of the eggs are soft
and of course don't hatch. I haven't done a percentage check on good eggs
lately but suspect that its still around 40% or less.
I thought perhaps it may have been water conditions and bumped up the
alkalinity but that didn't seem to make any difference also tried increasing
the salinity but again nothing? I also tried feeding them different types of
foods but it doesn't seem to matter either.
The other problem is that there just isn't too many of them in captivity to
experiment with and its a full time occupation just keeping the populations
going. As far as I know there are only 6 populations in captivity - 1 in the
States, 2 in Europe and 3 in Australia and all of them are having similiar
problems maintaining what they have.
The initial wild stock was split in half and two separate populations were
maintained but now my population has been bred back to the other population
- The stock in Europe
are descendants of my original wild stock and I think the US fish came from
Europe (Peter???). What we need is some more wild stock to see if there is
an improvement. It may well be that this species was on its way out anyway
despite help from the gambusia?
Adrian.
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Adrian R. Tappin
Home of the Rainbowfish
http://www.ecn.net.au/~atappin/home.htm
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