BREEDING Snowball Plecos - Over 100 Babies Made!

[Music] so today I wanted to make a video about probably one of the coolest fish tanks that I've got in the entire Warehouse right now and this is my l21 snowball pleco breeding tank I've never seen an aquarium like this if you showed me a video of this tank a few years ago I'd be over the moon happy and I can tell you that I definitely am over the moon happy about this tank so in here I've got a very special species which is a pan cistus and like I said these are the l21 I think they're oronoko Angel plecos technically but there's a lot of confusion between all of the like polka dot plecos that you get but these are a really cool hyp ancy species so they're very similar to the zebra plecos but these are a fish that I fell in love with a few years ago and I remember I was at my local fish store and I picked up a colony of six of them now the thing with all of these high hands and the thing that makes them a little bit more pricey is that they take a long time to reach sexual maturity so these guys took about 2 and 1/2 years to reach sexual maturity and I got like one spawn of them out of my old room I didn't really have much success with them I tried playing around with the eggs and it just never really worked I just couldn't get a rhythm and flow with them I kind of just left them and I was busy building this room so I ended up bringing them to this new room and set them up and they had another one or two spawns but I just never found out exactly how to do it I think maybe a year ago my good mate harand had to take down a few tanks in his fish room and he had a trio of these that he wanted to sell me so I ended up buying them off him for a really cheap price he really looked after me they were worth a lot more than what he sold them to me before and I just added them in here I don't know if that made much of a difference to the breeding group in all hesty cuz no spawning happened for a long time I've laughed on about this a lot with my pleco breeding I watched this video the Eric bod Rock Tour and I've said this before you guys are going to get sick of it but he talked about doing 50% water changes every day for a week and your fish will start to spawn especially catfish and I started to do that to try and spawn my zebra plecos and in the meantime these guys just went absolutely nuts like nuts and because I think that I'd gone through some of those issues with them in the past like trying to take the eggs out and the eggs fungus or losing batches of fry I honestly just kind of mentally gave up on these fish and I was happy to just sit here and look at a tank of nothing that I think was the secret to my success with these fish because I did that I just left the mail didn't check on him didn't look at with a torch or anything like that I wasn't overly excited about any of that 10 days later after I'd gotten a spawn out of them I knew there was a spawn he let the babies go which is the biggest fry that you see in here then the next day he was on another clutch of eggs same thing 10 days later kicks him out then there's in a second batch of eggs then the next day another clutch of eggs I think this has happened at least six or seven times now I've never taken a fry out of this tank Harem and I counter with our eyes looking at the tank I think close to 50 but that's just the surface I reckon there's at least 100 in here and he's on eggs again so he's gotten so good at breeding that he will be still on rers and take on another clutch of eggs so I think there's just one or two pairs in here that just keep breeding and breeding and breeding but this has honestly ended up as such a success and in this tank we've got yeah I I definitely think at least 100 of these plecos and the retail price for these goes from anywhere from about $70 to $90 here in Australia so there's quite a substantial amount of money in this tank personally I don't care I mean I kind of almost don't even intend on selling them I probably will have to sell a few of them because I don't know what I'm going to do with 90 snowball adult plecos but yeah it's ended up being a success so how did I breed them first thing was kind of just to ignore them I think the focus with plecos especially these ones is patience what I mean by that is this is not going to be something you're just going to achieve you know three or four months after buying this fish or even a couple weeks after buying this fish even if you buy adults I don't think that's a good idea but even if you do buy adults I don't know if you're going to get get them going straight away if anyone wants to have a go at doing a project like this like a big three or four year long project you've just got to sign up for the long run I bought this fish like I said I think it would have been 2020 like it would have been during Co and yeah it took like 3 years before they started to do anything so the way these guys breed when it does come time to breeding them is the males will occupy the caves so you'll see like males kind of sitting around caves and patrolling them and the Mal's goal is to get a female to go into the tank at which point he'll trap her in there he'll trap her in there for about a day to a day and a half sometimes even 3 days which don't freak out like that's pretty normal and then she'll lay her eggs and he'll stay in there with the eggs fan them away like a normal bristl noose he'll eventually hatch those eggs out raise them all the way up until they're free swimming fry and let them go so they're actually quite an easy fish to breed I think it's all about nutrition and just water changes so I keep these at 28° C which I think would be about 80° F and the TDS of the water I don't know if it's that important but it's like pretty moderate it's 220 PPM and then I think the pH would be about 7.8 pH 7.6 but honestly I don't really focus that much on it the main thing is just constant water changes so every time I'm in the fish room here this whole entire racks on an automatic water change system well all the tanks in the shop are the way the water change works is water comes in in one corner and dilutes the tank and flows out the other one so while I'm doing jobs in the fish room I'll just turn the water change on set a time for like 30 minutes and just turn it off if you do that every day it eventually just gets the tank super duper clear I think what makes these fish spawn is zero nitrates so you just want basically Crystal Clear tap water and that seems just to be the trick I don't think you can overdo it with the water changes when it comes to plecos I think just like lots and lots of water changes is the trick I'm going to be interested to see how these guys go over winter because they only been breeding during the summer season so I think this all started in November so since November I've made easily over 100 snowball plecos and it's now the start of April so you know there's been a good 4mon period there of breeding but during winter I want to see how they go because I don't know whether that will make a huge difference I also don't know whether as well having fry in the tank help them to breed again like maybe them seeing fry means oh it's time to breed so that might have also made a big difference their breeding but yeah like as for the set up it's a 2T tank so it's 80 L I've got nine adults in here I'm not too sure what the ratios are but there's probably a 50/50 mix of males and females there's a Sponge Filter which I clean religiously once a week just to keep it nice and clean especially with all these fry in here now I've got three caves the one that he breeds in is a handmade cave that I made which is kind of cool and I keep a big slate in here and besides that for food I feed these guys bug buffet and green Cuisine literally that's all I feed them for me the bug buffet and the green cuisine seem to be the ultimate food for breeding these fish and I don't say that lightly like I I genuinely believe in that because it like goes all over the tank when I mush it up all of these little babies get to eat and grow which is really helpful and the adults get to eat but because the ingredients are all natural you know the primary ingredients like insect meal and there's no hidden nasties in there I think that makes a huge difference to the nutrition for the fish so I think that's helped them to breed as well yeah I mean this is just one of the coolest tanks I've had in the shop for very long time just to summarize this video I think the main thing is to take the pressure off the fish don't be like constantly like looking at them and trying to to do things to spawn them don't like add RO water or anything like that just keep it really consistent tons of water changes nice and clean you know a few caves here and there and just a really good diet and they will just start to breed but like I don't know how to explain that cuz it is a bit hard to do don't care so much don't count eggs before they hatch don't care don't try and strip them out I think with fish like this you almost have to the the thing that people get stuck on and one of the things that I got stuck on was the fact that they cost a lot of money you become attached to that like I did when I at the start when I first had to breed these because back then I was breeding fish to survive like I was breeding fish to make money so it was important that I was making money and when I got a fish like this to breed I was thinking oh great that's like a $600 spawn but that is where like I think things kind of Come Undone because you might not make the best decisions you get emotions involved with it so for me now like with all of my fish I'm happy to lose the first couple of spawns just to try and see if they can raise up the babies themselves and let them figure it out like all of these babies would grow up in the wild and they're going to breed for the first time and they're probably not going to have a clue what to do and they're probably going to do the exact same thing that they do in a fish tank in the wild and screw up their first few years of breeding until they're much more mature and old fish at which stage they'll figure it out like this male has and once you've got that that is so much more useful than doing all the work that he can just do for you like a lot of pleco breeders take the eggs out strip the eggs out for me maybe I'm just lazy but I think like the best way to breed a lot of catfish is just to let them do the work you know whip tails and and these guys I think like if you can take a lot of the work out of it it makes it so much easier on you and it's honestly just way more enjoyable like one of my favorite things to do in the room lately is just walk up to this tank look at it and every morning the eggs inside the cave develop a little bit more and it's just so cool to see so I'm going to have a hard time parting with a lot of these fish um that's for sure and you know it's been like a a big four year long process so anyways I've I've rambled on for long enough um I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: KeepingFishSimple

Views: 40,663

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Id: Ckiwm3SSNRk

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024