> When I was doing OK with mine (RFBE's) I was using UGF with shellgrit
> substrate.
I never saw soft eggs when I had the fish in Melbourne (wild fish). Water
there is soft, around 20-40 ppm (all hardnesses I quote are general Ca/Mg).
The fish I recieved from Europe produced nearly all soft eggs, and they were
in Phoenix water, which is ~250 ppm and very high in carbonates with a pH ~8
or more. Also, as Bruce points out, the water they occur in in the wild is
very soft, mostly saturated with sodium bicarbonate, hence it's pH of around
8. My measurements were around 20 ppm, Rob Wager's where a bit higher, but I
don't know if he was just measuring Ca/Mg. Actually, just checked his report,
they got no Magnesium and he didn't give a general hardness value. Hence, my
readings of 20ppm would almost entirely be Calcium.
> I used floating mops with the wool pulled up close to the floats
> and often had eggs on the underside of the styro and very top of the wool. I
> am unsure whether that was a preferred spot or the eggs persisted there
> better as they were less obvious to the egg-eating "onlookers' not actually
> involved in the spawning.
I also often found eggs on the top of mops. They were frequently clustered in
groups of 2 up to 6.
> I got the impression ( from photos of the habitat and the chunk of
> riparian/marginal plants that I still have growing here) that all the likely
> spawning sites are marginal and therefore the breeders would have to come up
> to the surface virtually to spawn in the roots and runners of the
When the water is only 2 centimeters deep the difference between the bottom
and surface starts to become blurred. :-) They would need to be careful
laying them too high or they would dry out rapidly (being desert). But I
suspect you are correct in that they are laid high to avoid predation. Not
sure that one could test that hypothesis, but it sounds good. :-)
Tootles
Peter Unmack