BREEDING Whiptail Catfish - 50 Babies Made!

today we're going to be talking about how I bred my Royal whip [Music] Tails so I've had these f for quite a while I've had them at least 3 years now and there's actually a funny story with these fish so I've heard from others that these fish are quite tricky to breed and I can confirm this myself I failed multiple times with this species and only recently I found success and I've raised up about 50 of them this was between two spawns but a few years ago I got eggs from a trio that I bought as adults I actually got these to spawn and I failed because of a pump going off in my fish room so the pump clogged the water went bad in the fry tray and I lost all of them except for one I had a similar thing happened with my adults and I actually lost my adult male as well so I had two females and one baby Royal whiptail I grew that baby Royal whiptail up with all of the ones you can see here so I've got a trio again and that Royal whiptail actually ended up being a male I was lucky enough to end up with a trio in the end one male and two females but it took a long time to get these fish up to sexual maturity I think they're about 2 and 1/2 years old at this point I wasn't intending to breed these at all I actually luckily one day walked into the fish room and this tank is right up the back corner of my 4-foot tanks in here I've got some blare ey rainbows that I've been growing out to adult size and you can see they're starting to get quite big but I just looked in this tank I put them in the back corner just thinking you know I'll grow them out I don't want to let go of them if they breed they breed if not I don't care I had to look up here and I found the male up on this back piece of glass behind the roots with a clutch of eggs so the way these fish lay eggs is on the glassier tanks they like to lay on like a smooth surface so they must lay on slate or I have no clue what they lay on in the wild maybe a plant but they always find themselves near a Sponge Filter behind some roots and they lay their eggs like that the female will come up and lay her eggs on the glass and the male will sit there on top of the eggs and fan them and take care of them by the time I saw it the male had already done pretty much the entire job and you could actually see the little whip Tails inside of the shell which was just fascinating to look at like you could see the little bodies starting to form and I decided that obviously with all these fish in here it was going to be a massive challenge to have baby Whi Tails hatch out and actually survive in here without adding a ton of hiding spaces and I think that there was probably a low likelihood that even survived because these rainbows would smash them so I don't know what caused the spawn I think the tank was pretty dirty we cleaned the sponge filters up and we did a massive water change in here and that must have triggered them to spawn again I'm not entirely sure I just kind of luckily walked into a spawn I think if you get four or five of these as juveniles grow them up for a couple of years put them in a tank and just continually water change it feed them good food like bug Buffet I feed them green cuisine as well they'll eventually they'll just spawn what I decided to do was to the eggs out and this was like a really nerve-wracking process we used a credit card and a net and I just scooped the eggs off of the glass the male left the egg straight away after he saw my hand and they all fell into the net and I put them into my fry system now I think this is going to be a crucial part of the entire process is having a fry system um if not you could probably get away with using like a zys breeder box or some kind of contraption like that but when it comes to breeding fish if you're serious about it you're going to need to get some equipment I like to use my DIY fry system for this it just seemed to do the trick I think it would have worked in a this box but the fry system seemed to work really well I set them up in a little tray and just put all the eggs in there no methylene blue no nothing because these were pretty much ready to hatch the one thing I did was I made sure that the water going into my fry tray was insanely fast I had a lot of pressure going in there just to keep the eggs nice and fresh keep the water nice and fresh and to stop anything growing on the eggs the funny thing about whip tails is when the eggs are about to hatch you might notice one or two hatch but I think the male flicks the eggs and it gets them to break their Chan layer and actually come out what I noticed was I saw them getting really close to hatching and I was thinking when the heck are these going to hatch I squirted them down with a pet with some water and they all of a sudden just all started to hatch out I actually got some footage of one popping out of an egg and yeah it was just absolutely awesome to see I've just kept them in tap water the whole time U my tap water is about 7.6 pH 200 parts per million hardness it's nothing special I mean they might breed in softer water more regularly but I'm just going to leave them like this for now until they spawn or if they don't spawn again I might change it but I left them just in the tap water they all hatched out and from here I did a few little reading tricks and I added some soaked banana leaves so I did a trick that I think I heard it maybe it was just a while back on one of the catfish Specialists that was on the aquarium c channel years ago and he talked about he bred lots of whip Tails I think he'd bred like chameleon whip tails and things that were really cool like that which I'd love to do at some point they'd had this trick and baby whip Tails eat offw walks or biofilm for their first few days of Life they're very hard to raise I've found whip tails to be incredibly hard to raise as babies myself I find most catfish actually quite tricky to raise and this is just because I think they have really specific needs when they're young once they're adults they're a lot easier but the trick was you need to grow this biofilm so biofilm forms on every surface in your aquarium it grows on the leaves it grows on decaying matter pretty much biofilm all over the tank we talk about it when we breed shrimp I think this is what the baby whip Tails eat for their first meal so what I did was I got this bucket of really dirty filter water and I put some alond leaves in there and some banana leaves dry and soaked them in this disgusting water and it was brown and yuck but a few days later I think all those bacteria that were in the filter started to Decay the leaves and you could feel they were kind of slimy so what I did was I added these leaves into the tray once I saw that the babies had hatched out they instantly all kind of like stuck to it and the thing is about these catfish I don't think they actively pursue food so I think they have to just kind of like passively be eating this stuff and that's why the leaves helped a lot like I added quite a few leaves in here they all just kind of stuck to it and I saw they were passively eating it this is where it gets complicated with this fish it's not an easy fish to raise I actually set up this little Contraption a while back and I use it to raise Rams and I had this idea like the struggle with raising whip tails is making sure they get enough food during the day they constantly need to be just sitting on a surface that they can consume from and I was thinking well how am I going to do this I'm only coming in here once or twice a day and I don't I don't have the ability to constantly feed them because this fish room's away from home what I decided to do was I use this kind of like chicken feeder method I've got a doser that they use for dosing corals with fertilizers it's a peristaltic pump I think something like that it connects to Wi-Fi and it connects to my phone and I can turn it on when I want to it runs I think five times a day every couple of hours I filled up the bottle with that same filter juice like just disgusting kind of filter juice nothing stinky just like fresh filter juice and that dosed into the tank a few times a day and I think it refreshed that bofilm for me and I think that they all kind of just ate that that biomatter I've used this biomatter to raise tons of fish but it seemed to work really well I did that for the first few days once I noticed that the Yol sacks were gone that's when I started to turn that on and from there I actually noticed them starting to develop what I continued to do was as I saw them growing up I added a little bit of food into that that doser the food I added I think it was the green Cuisine for the first couple of days just some light veggie mat based food I sell this on my website down below it might be released by the time I post this video I'm not too sure but I fed the green Cuisine into that I fed a very light amount so that was getting dosed in there as well like that was part of the the water mixture that I had dosing in there and I also introduced some Brian shrimp as well so they started to eat that and over the next few days they continue to grow once they get to a certain size you're kind of in the clear the trick here was was making sure that my little breeder box stayed clean to keep it clean and to keep eating all that biofilm and waste matter that wasn't being eaten like there was tons of leftover food in in this box every time I fed it because the whip tails are just kind of like stupid and they don't go up to the food what I did was I added some baby mystery snails in here as well those baby mystery snails actually helped to keep the Box clean so the box was like spotless the only thing that was in there was a little bit of whip tailo the snails did a great job eating up all the leftover green Cuisine and all that biomatter and within a couple of weeks the whip Tails had grown quite significantly by this stage I think they started to outgrow the Box a little bit they were so cute they looked so so cute and you can see the little Tails whipping around whenever I fed it it was it was awesome to watch at this stage I added them to a twoot tank and I really tried to start growing them out so what I did for the twoof foot tank was I kept it really shallow and just had a sponge filter in there that Sponge Filter helped to keep it clean enough and having it shallow just meant that it was a little bit bigger than the box but not too big that they couldn't find their food I added tons and tons of Botanical in there Leaf litter like Indian almond leaves banana leaves all that sort of stuff and I continued to feed them bug buffet and green Cuisine the thing that's good about these two Foods is obviously I make them so I'm going to talk good things about them but because they really can break up into that powder you can swirl it around the tank like a milk and create that like biofilm in the tank it'll spread around and it just helps everyone to get some it's like the most natural way for these fish to eat the food and it's just super malleable like that so I instantly started feeding a ton of green Cuisine I added some snails in there and from there they just really grew but I found this fish quite tricky to raise if you guys want to do this at home this is going to be one where you definitely going to need like a breedo box a lot of time and you're going to need some ingenuity and try and figure out a way to raise them like I did with like a doser and all this sort of stuff I figured out really why they are so tricky to raise but theyve definitely been one of the most rewarding catfish I've Ever Raised I absolutely love their little faces I'm super Keen to try and get a few more spawns out of them I can't really think of anything more that would have made this breed I think maybe having all these dither fish in here helped a little bit too just make them feel a little bit more comfortable they're quite active I think the other thing that might have happened as well to make them spawn was I think a storm went over a couple of days beforehand and yeah I came back to a bunch of eggs so that's how I B my whip tows I hope you guys enjoyed this little video I hope it's useful for you and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: KeepingFishSimple

Views: 41,407

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Id: FjuVAeNJf4M

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024