I finally got a new Type of Gardneri. I found this one at a local pet store. I got them from Oddball Pets in Pittsburgh, PA. A man by the name of Eric Bodrock bred my pair. I wanted a pair and they only had males left at the store. The owners said that he was going to be bringing fish in so they asked him for a pair. I waited for awhile until he showed up at the store. I was really excited to bring my new killifish home. I house the pair in a 5 gallon aquarium filtered with a modified HOB filter to reduce the current alot. That way I do not have air pumps going in my bedroom/fish room. They layed eggs at least I found them today. I am a bit nervous as I have spawned Fp. Gardneri Akure but I have done it with an undergravel filter by vacuuming the tank and keeping the water in the buckets until they hatched. I never actually saw the eggs of that species but they hatched and grew. This is my first time actually getting them to spawn for me in a spawning mop. I have read their a switch spawning killifish according to an article by Clint Norwood of petfish.net can be spawned with mops or by using peat. So should I collec the eggs and store on peat or should I leave them alone on their mop and hatch them in water? I am so excited to hatch the eggs. I have had two strains of Aphyosemion Striatum as well as Aphyosemion Australe and Fp. Gardneri Akure and now Fp. Gardneri Misaje. I could never get any of them to breed except the akures. Now I have had the Fp. Gardneri Misaje lay eggs. I can't wait to see if I can get them to hatch for me and raise them to adults. Any advice on hatching them and rearing them would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for any help you can offer me.

Their care will be the same as Fp. gardneri Akure, and they're just as easy to breed. There are many different ways to handle eggs of gardneri species.

1. Pick eggs from the mop, put them in water (petri dish, margerine tub, plastic cup whatever) and water incubate them. This is a good short term method, picking eggs over a week they will hatch within a close window of eachother. Usually they will start hatching within 2 weeks.

2. Pick eggs from the mop, place on damp peat in a petri dish or other covered container. This works well if you're collecting eggs over a longer period (2-3 weeks) since you can leave all the eggs on the damp peat until they're ready to hatch.

3. Take out mop, squeeze out excess water so the mop is just damp and seal in a plastic bag. Make sure you can see a couple of eggs through the bag so you can tell when they're ready to hatch. This works well if there's a lot of eggs on the mop at one time. Ready within 2 weeks.

4. Natural setup with gravel, java moss, other plants, mops etc or just a 2.5 gal or 5 gal tank filled half way with sphagnum moss. Put in a pair for a couple of weeks, take them out and wait for fry to show up. This works OK for me with Misaje, but not my first choice. I do use it for Aphyosemion species with excellent results.

5. Seperate the pair to their own tanks and condition for a week. (not a bad idea when using any method) Set up a 2.5 gal tank with 1/4" of peat on the bottom. Introduce the pair to this tank after conditioning for a few hours up to a whole day, then seperate and feed. Introduce to the tank again the next day. I do this for about a week, usually rotating pairs if I have more than one. After a week or 10 days pull the peat, squeeze out excess water, put in a bag and fluff up. Incubate for 6 weeks at 75 degrees. This method is more involved and more work, but usually gives me good results.

In methods 1-3 watch for eggs that are fungusing up and remove them.

Ok thank-you. I am going to try bagging the mops this time around as well that is the easiest method for me at this point with the way I set it up. I will try the more time consuming method once Spring Break from college starts in March. I think the mop method will work best for me while in school as I need to concentrate on school. I really did not expect me to successful so soon. I figured it would take awhile for me to get it right if I even did. I am just excited that I got them to spawn for me. Wish me luck! Thanks again for all your help.

I just thought of something. How can I tell when they are ready to hatch? When I bred the Akures I did by vacuuming the tank and letting the bucket of water sit. I never actually saw the eggs. So how do I tell? do I just wait two weeks and put the mop back in water or is there a better way to tell? Thanks for any information you can give me.

You'll be able to see the golden iris of the embryo's eyes.

Ok. Thank-You very much. I really appreciate all your help. So far none of the eggs have fungused. Hopefully in a few weeks they will all hatch and grow into nice healthy fish.

Hey Santaaa!

Kudos on getting your gardneri going. The "Akure" strain (under a couple of names of convenience) was one of the 1960s and maybe even earlier. First collected by Steinholt Clausen in 1955, another 1957 collection was collected by someone named Birket-Smith who brought them to Jorgan Scheel, a very accomplished Danish aquarist who is famous for many things, among them introducing gardneri around the hobby by mailing killie eggs to other interested aquarists, especially in Europe and North America. Those eggs especially got passed in the mails between 1958 and
1960.

Fp. gardneri are found all over a large percentage of Nigeria above a certain altitude. (That is in Scheel's books and not immediately handy - sorry!) The annual rainfall numbers drop as one goes north. And gardneri can be found as the vegetation becomes scrub brush and grass. They reach surprisingly close to the desert. (Check out Kano on a map.)

Fp. gardneri even are supposed to show a annual tendency that is more pronounced among northern populations. One can keep most their eggs a couple of weeks on fairly wet peat moss. (If the eggs will not hatch via water incubation - a very rare occurrence - definitely try that.)

They have demonstrated that they can live in quite a number of water chemistries. Since they are thriving in your water supply, just keep doing partial water changes as often is convenient.

You mention keeping a couple of the Aphyosemion that seemed to thrive in your tanks, but gave you no eggs. That suggests that you were not too far from getting eggs from them. If you were to add a percentage of de-mineralized water (clean rain water collected maybe after a half-hour or Reverse Osmosis or even distilled water if you can get it cheaply) maybe in 10% increments you might find those Aphyosemion leaving viable eggs after a time and a certain number of drops in mineral content.

My guess is that the striatum would offer up eggs first and with an additional drop in mineral levels the australe would begin producing eggs. (That is why some feel that australe, beautiful as they are, really isn't the best nominee as a first killie.)

I like your resourcefulness in gravel vacuuming into a bucket and saving the eggs. If I need eggs of several species, we will place a fine-meshed net over a bucket and run the hoses' stream through the net. The muck in the net will be rinsed and the eggs then removed to holding containers filled with seasoned, treated water of about the same chemistry and temperature. Their water is cleaner than your bucket water, but the eggs may be more battered.

Do a 50% water change in your holding bucket(s). Maybe do it a second time the next day. And a day later do a 100% water change. :)

Wiser aquarists than I have suggested doing 100% water changes in small incubation containers after a week. Also, incubate those eggs out of bright light.

A variation on Nick's natural tank, method 4, is to separately condition the pair, place them in the planted tank for a week or two, feed them only live foods and then remove them. Fry should appear shortly there after. William Innes and his crowd were suggesting that nearly a century ago. That will offer up more fry than those that accompany
adults in the more conventional natural set-up.

We should mention that if we are really interested in collecting a large number of killie eggs in a short time, the tank bottom should be without gravel. That tank should only have floating and maybe sunken mops, a sponge filter and perhaps a couple of inert rocks for the female(s) to hide behind.

(But you also need to set up another tank or three for growing out the fry.)

For those with the tank space, females and males can be separately conditioned and then put together. They may
leave an amazing number of eggs in that first day or two. (Recently did that with a mature pair of Riv. hartii and
got 70+ eggs in the first 3-4 hours, despite the fact that they ate a few.)

To keep breeders from foraging in the mop, leave a small (mustard, salsa, pickle) jar (soap-less of course) on the aquarium bottom. Take your turkey baster and squirt a few rinsed black worms in there. The killies should consume the worms before their eggs.

The so-called plant spawning killies will lay their eggs in a variety of places, very often in the gravel. In the wild that is a good survival strategy. The gardneri are often enthusiastic gravel spawners and it seems to work for them. I'm not so sure about the bivs that laid eggs on a floating thermometer in the planted 20-gallon community they inhabited. ;)

Probably it is time to see if you can set up some sort of brine shrimp hatcher. And secure some rams horn snails for clean up patrol once the eggs all hatch. ;)

If you would like a little info on when and how those gardneri got into the hobby, that can be added as another comment.

By the way, if you bought breeders from Eric B, you are probably close to the Pittsburgh killie club. Those killie people are great resources. Talk to them. Try and catch a meeting - probably at a member's house and watch how the hosts keep their killies.

Good luck and all the best!

If the snow lets up I plan to get microworms to start new cultures. They sell them at Oddball Pets. I am about 45 minutes to an hour North of Pittsburgh. I go there because they have the best pet store around. If I can't get up there I will pick up liquafry. That is what I raised my Fp. Gardneri Clauseni Akures on because at that point I did not know about Oddball Pets. It works very well. Messy but it worked for me. Also, hard boiled egg yolk works great too an old school method for most fry but very useful in a pinch.
Thank-You for all the information. I really appreciate it. Anymore information you can give me would be greatly appreciated. Thank-You.

Yeah this snow is inconvenient. A shop light over a planted 40-gallon tank died its final death. I'm chaffing at the bit to either get another shop-light or find a couple (cheap) 4" used strip lights. Probably would be wise to shovel judiciously, stay in, make partial water changes and do house stuff with any discretionary time today. My wife would be pleased and surprised.

Probably shouldn't say it, but I am relieved that there have been relatively few power outages with all of these storms.

Micro worms multiply so fast (make two cultures from your starter) they are a good idea. The gardneri fry will forage on the bottom. Micro worms can be useless for those fry that always stay on the surface. But by themselves they are pretty thin fare after a few days.

Whatever we use, bellies should be full. The same amount of food fed three times a day, is more beneficial that one big feeding. And of course we all have days when the killies are just lucky to get fed :)

By the way, since you have gravel and if you set up a fry tank may use biologically active gravel imported from the parents' tank, can you get a cheap, shallow, glass cereal bowl at a Dollar Store (or reasonable equivalent)? Or use half a glass petrie dish and verrrry gently squirt the worms in there? That way they are available to the fry but not too many will get into the gravel to ultimately expire, rot and feed resident protists.

Unless you are using Liquifry to feed Moina (a mini-Daphnia) or protist cultures like Paramecium, I would skip them. While a little powdered eggs yolk might be useful the first day or two (I was astonished to learn that egg yolk is a significant part of that APR stuff) I would rather establish a bunch of plants in there. The fry will forage on rotifers and other microscopic critters living on the leaves and stems.

Water sprite and Java moss would be my first choices. Hornwort and Najas (better suited for harder water) would be my second choices. Java moss and Crypts are great but probably more for me than the fry. Because the first four suggested plants grow so fast, they are often available through friends or a local aquarium or specialty club. If you have an aquatic gardener or aquatic gardener's group in the area, ask around for the odd cutting otherwise headed for the compost heap.

Newly hatched gardneri do have mouths big enough to take recently (1-4 hour) hatched bbs (baby brine shrimp.) They can handle foods of larger size than some other newly hatched killies, although I'm increasing surprised to learn of other killie fry that also have bigger mouths than I realized. We need to research each species (or closely related species/strains) and not take for granted what they can or can not take.

The gardneri fry can and will take flake food pulverized between one's fingers. I squeeze a couple of small veggie or regular flakes over a tank of livebearers or half inch to inch long gardneri youngsters and just wipe off a little of the remaining powder in with the new-born and their rams horn snail. Still not as good as live food, it will be taken by gardneri and many surface dwellers.

I wouldn't use that powdered flake food with annuals. Some (Nothos that I have heard of according to Lou Sandberg) can be later trained to take flake food when being weaned off of bbs. Put a couple like-sized live bearers or gardneri in with the Notho youngsters. The "role models" will continue to greedily gobble up appropriately sized flakes. When the previously hungry Nothos are taking flakes, the gardneri or live bearers, since they can be distinguished from the Nothos, are removed.

Where is Odd Ball pets? A couple of times we have visited our son and his wife, who are finishing up grad school in the area. I really regret that we have never been there when it would be possible to visit PAKA or the GPAS.

Isn't it funny/ sad how far, even in urban areas, that one must travel to find shops with what they need. An interesting trend is for one of the larger clubs to hold "swap meets" where individual sellers rent tables and bring in all manner of aquatic stuff. Some of that (like Red Flint Gravel) is pretty hard to find elsewhere any more

The Chicago killie group (thanks to Todd's initiative) has begun renting a table at a couple of the Greater Chicago Cichlid Association's massive swap meets - 70 vendors, 500 to 775 attendees. It turns out to also be also quite a social occasion for fish heads.

While handing out propaganda, talking fish, selling killies, plants and food cultures, we've made a number of new contacts and friends. Five very sharp individuals, so far, have joined the CKA and two have already joined the AKA.

I think that in St Louis the big general club MASI has swap meets filling a similar niche. The Milwaukee Aquarium Society is doing that too. It would be interesting and useful to hear of other such events.

Actually I don't use gravel with the Misaje tank. I only did that with the akures and that is because I did not know better. The tank I have the Misaje with is bare. Just check out oddballpets.com the store is junky looking from the outside and inside is not the nicest but when you look in the tanks they have alot of hard to find fish and great quality products to sell. Their fish are healthy and if they are concerned something is not they write Not for Sale on the tank and won't sell them until they are sure they are fine. Some fish are bred at the store, some are purchased, and some are bought from local breeders. Last time I was there they had probably 4 or 5 differrent types of killifish. Fp. Gardneri Misaje, Aphyosemion Striatum of some sort, Aphyosemion Australe, Golden Wonders. They carry food in bulk very reasonably priced. Blackworms are what I mostly go there for.They have tons of different starter cultures to pick from for fry food. They have all sorts of awesome plants that come in. seriously they are really great. The staff is knowledgable and if they don't know they take a minute to go over to the computer and pull stuff up on the internet and research it. Certain things are expensive such as heaters and tanks but if you can not find something you really want then this is the place to go. They just expanded into saltwater tanks. I am considering starting my first salt water tank with a couple of Clownfish but I want to do more research before I get into that. Really the store is great and one of my favorite pet stores to go to. They sell discus fish but they are to expensive for me but for what they are they are priced fairly.