Once you become more competent with keeping fish in your aquarium, the time will come when you want to turn your hand at starting your own fish tank breeding program. You’ll find that not only does this save you some money, but it’ll rapidly become one of the more rewarding activities that you do. To help you, here are some of the more obvious things you should look out for when you start a breeding program in your aquarium:
What type of fish are you breeding
It may sound painfully obvious, but the species of fish that you decide to breed in your aquarium is going to play a large part in you overall input in making sure that the breeding program is a complete success. Here, regardless of which species of fish you have, the breeding habits of fish can essentially be broken-down into two broad categories:
– Viviparous fish, which means the fish species in question gives birth to live baby fish (fry), ready and eager to swim around in your aquarium; or
– Oviparous, which means the species in question lays eggs that later develop into fry. Within the oviparous species of fish, you also have fish that like to hide their eggs, fish that like to stand guard over their eggs, or fish that like to scatter their eggs.
Now, you should probably know at this stage that if you have never breed fish in the captivity of your aquarium previously, viviparous fish are far easier to keep as breeding fish than oviparous.
Protecting your fry from predators
One thing you’ll quickly notice when breeding fish is the large number of fry that are produced in one time. In fact you may become quite daunted by the sheer number of fry swimming around. Before you rush off and panic about this however, you need to know that the reason why so many fry are breed in one time is because they’re so prone to predator attacks. And the biggest predator of fry fish are the fry’s own parents! So, if you want to stand any chance at all of having some fry left over after a spawning, you are going to need to give the young baby fish in your aquarium some form of protection from their own parents and kind!
There are two easy ways to protect your new baby fish. The first, and by far the easiest, is to keep them in a separate aquarium. The second, more natural, but also more hazardous methods, is to keep the fry in the same aquarium as the adult fish, but to provide them with plenty of vegetation to hide in
Oviparous fish
If you are going to breed oviparous fish then the issue of whether or not you have a second breeding aquarium is quickly settled, you simply will not be able to breed oviparous egg-laying fish in captivity if you do not have a second tank in which to breed them. Moreover, to give the fish somewhere to lay their eggs, you need to make sure the aquarium is as close to the natural habitat of the fish. This will include making sure the bottom of the aquarium is covered with a good layer of gravel so that the eggs can be protected from any predators out there looking to eat them up.
Remember the water temperature
One factor that can easily be overlooked when you are breeding fish in the captivity of your aquarium is that the water temperature in your breeding tank needs to be just right for that fish species. If you do not have just the right water temperature, your breeding program is not going to be successful as your fish are not going to breed!
Size does matter
Finally, keep in mind that the size of your aquarium will play a direct role in the number of new fry that are spawned by fish breeding in there. More often than not, the larger the tank the more chance you have of having a successful spawn, but, again, this also very much depends on you being able to maintain an ideal water temperature in your tank.