Sorry to hear about your latest aqua-sition Mach. You have just started on
the road to endless frustration, hard work and little reward.
I have posted to this list in the past a summary of my own frustrations with
empires. Yes I did manage to raise some fry on different occasions with
different methods. I used microencapsulated prawn feed and artemia/rotifer
booster (5 - 35 micron size, I think); finely seived plankton cultures
(anything that passed through a 63 micron screen (that is 0.063 mm) and
green water culture in outdoor ponds. I guess I really didn't think it worth
the effort but then I can catch the sods in the creek in my back yard -
literally.
The hard bit is to take them from yolk saclarve to free swimming/eating fry.
The next few hours will be critical. Some hints -
Don't try and raise to many in an aquarium. I'd say 200 in a two footer
would be heaps. This ensures that all the fish get enough food. A whole
spawn may be several thousand larvae and it can be difficult to ensure that
each fish gets enough food. Especially when microscopic food items may be in
short supply.
If you have a microscope look at the larvae every hour or so. When you can
see their guts starting to contract it is time to lay on the food in bulk.
The larvae are transparent and you can see a wave of muscle contraction
along the gut tube.
You could also compare their mouth size to the food item you are using. I
found that some strains of rotifers were too big!!!
If you use artificial foods be prepared to do very frequent water changes.
Good Luck.
> I just got to see/aquired some Empire Gudgeon fry. Bloddy things
>are small. Allmost looks like newly hatched artemia could eat them. Going
>to try to pump them up with rotifers and green water. They look about the
>size of some of our native goby/sleeper fry in terms of size and
>development. Ours get washed out to sea and spend most of larval
>development in the marine or estuarine environment. Do you think that the
>empires are about the same and may need brackish water for devlopment.
>Looking at how wide spread they are I would suspect they might spend some
>time at sea...
>
>MTF
>
>
>
>Mach T. Fukada, Web Master
>fukada at hawaii.edu
>Honolulu Aquarium Society
>http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/2948/HASF.html
>
>