I Made a Machine That Feeds My Fish For Me! Baby Fish Feeder!

hey how's it going everyone welcome back to keeping fish simple so in today's video we are going to be doing a really fun project now before we get into the nitty-gritties of this i wanted to quickly show you what's going on in this tank now for the past couple of videos i've been really trying hard to get my rams breeding properly and as you would know i've been trying to raise the fry myself now before i talk about doing any of that i wanted to quickly show you this pair which has turned out to be quite a good pair and a repair that i believe are going to be able to raise their eggs and raise their fry up themselves now you can see here that we've got a pair of these beautiful blue black rams on top of a clutch of eggs now these guys have been paying a lot of attention to these eggs and have been working really well together as a team so i decided against pulling these eggs out and trying to hatch them myself just because i didn't see any point in doing it because they're protecting these eggs from the endless that are above they're not bickering with each other and it seems that most of the eggs are fertilized which is also a really good sign of teamwork so i decided to leave these eggs in with the parents and i'm going to be really interested to see how these guys go over the next coming days i'm going to keep you guys updated within this vlog on how they go with raising their fry so that's what's happening over here in this tank but let's get to talking about this automatic feeding system so if you guys have been watching the channel for a little while you know they've been struggling to breed my rams now i've been having some success bringing my rams and it's only been the way that i was showing you before with leaving the fry in with the parents letting the parents raise them up into little tiny juveniles and then i'll take them out and raise them up myself the part of breeding that i've been having trouble doing is taking the eggs out and hatching them myself and then raising those fry myself now i think this is due to a few factors the first thing was just the conditions that they were in and we fixed that up in the last vlog now the second thing is feeding now i don't think i'm feeding these guys enough and also i've been watching the channel for a little while you would know that this fish room's not at my house and that makes things a little bit more tricky when it comes to feeding because i can only get here twice a day i normally come in the morning in the afternoon and throughout that middle period i'm not really getting here to feed them and i'm also having trouble getting here early enough in the morning for them to have their first feeding because i can sometimes get here at 10 a.m when i'm normally about to get here at 8 a.m and then it's just the whole thing's just gone bust so i've actually got two little german blue ram spawns up in that container over there two of the pairs we set up in the last video actually spawn simultaneously in the same tank and all those eggs seem to be fertilized and they will be hatching very very soon so i want to try and raise those eggs up myself and we're going to be raising them up in a similar method that we were using in the last video but this time we're going to be setting up an auto fetus so i think this video is going to be really useful for a lot of people seeing how to innovate your way through a breeding project and try and come up with a way to actually do it properly i don't know where this is going to work i think that we've found the solution though and the way we're going to be doing this is using something called a peristaltic pump so the peristaltic pump basically what it does is it takes liquid from one end of a tube to the other end of the tube by squeezing it it just kind of like squeezes it like toothpaste and gets it out the other end so what these are commonly used for is chemicals like a lot of laboratories and stuff would use this for dosing chemicals but i bought this pump with the intention of using it in my auto water change system to dose tap water conditioner but i never ended up using it for that so we've just got this peristaltic pump and i thought it'd be great to do some liquid food into our containers so by doing this we're going to be able to get our feedings up to four times a day rather than two times a day and we're going to be more accurate with the timings of the feeding so we're going to be using like a liquid fry food what's going to be in this food is we're going to use a infusoria culture base then we're going to use vinegar eels on top of that and we're also going to add some kind of powdered food into that mix as well and hopefully that'll be enough nutrition for our little baby rams to grow and then move on to baby brine shrimp so tonight before i want to do the feeding i'm going to come in set this whole system up with the liquid fry food and i'm going to connect it obviously to our container i'm going to turn the timer on for the next morning to come on at like 6 a.m the next morning the time will come on feed all that food into the container i'll come in at 8 00 am like i normally do do a manual feeding myself and reset the system back up to feed at 12 pm they'll get another feeding at 12 p.m i'll come back in at 3 p.m do another feeding myself and then i might try and set up like a bigger container so i can do two feedings i'll do a feeding hopefully at 6 00 pm and then also another feeding at 6am the next morning and repeat the process and hopefully this will work this is going to work really well with our fry system as well if you guys watched the last video you would see that i use dean's for our system and i think that that method's going to work really well i mean i'm not too sure i hope this works if this does work i'm obviously going to set up like a way more extravagant setup with a ton of different outlets so i can feed multiple containers but for now we're just going to do one container so let's go home set this thing up i'll show you guys how i think this is going to work before we install it into this setup so let's go home okay so we're now in my laundry room and i wanted to take an opportunity to quickly show you guys how this system will exactly work so you can see here i've got my peristaltic pump now i've got this thing for about 60 bucks and i found it somewhere random online now you can see it's got an inlet and an outlet and then it also has this little knob on the back which controls the speed at which we want to pump our liquid the way this works is like i was talking about before it squeezes the tube and that way it creates suction and it'll suck liquid from one side of the tube to the other side a really good example here is i've got two glasses of water and you can see when i turn the pump on the pump will drag water from the first cup to the second cup so you can kind of imagine here that we'll have our food in the first cup and the second cup will be the fried tray with the fry in it now the way we're going to control this is using a timer and what we're going to do is schedule the timer to turn on through multiple intervals throughout the day and that'll be our feedings so with our prototype in place i took the pump back to the fish room and found a nice little spot to set it up so i place the pump in between these two tanks and it fits perfectly so i don't know if it's just by chance or if it was like destiny that we were going to eventually do this but it fit absolutely perfectly and you can see here i've got my timer here set up so i've scheduled to have a few feedings here one at 6 a.m and another one at 12 p.m now the annoying thing about this timer is it'll run for 30 minutes so it's going to pump all the liquid and it'll probably keep the pump going for a little bit longer than it needs to so that's not a big deal but we set this up we plugged it in and you can see here our pump's working perfectly i then attached two airline tubings so one that was going to be connected to our food container and one that was going to be connected to our fried tub i then added a food reservoir so you can see here i'm just using a big container now this can fit about two and a half liters of water so we can leave quite a lot of food for overnight if we wanted to do that i then added the inlet tube to that container and i ran the outlet tube for where the food was going to go over to our fryer container i gave the system a quick test and it was working absolutely perfectly so i'm really happy with how this is working okay so we've just set the system up and i've given it a quick test and it's working really well now we obviously don't have any little free swimmers yet so we've got to wait for our eggs behind us to hatch before we can actually test this so they're about to hatch i think they hatch tomorrow and then they're going to take another couple of days after that to get to free swimming now we're going to be able to finally test this so i think the only way is that the system wouldn't work is if this clogs up or if it turns off for some reason but i think that everything should work perfectly i've currently got the container full of water at the moment so that i can see if i come back tomorrow whether the system triggered and went off and if all the water went into that container and make sure all the systems are in place like no pipes have fallen out or anything like that yeah fingers crossed this will work i'm really really hopeful at the moment that this will so yeah i'll catch up with you guys in a couple days and we'll give this thing a proper test okay so it's now the next morning and if we come back to our background breeding tank you can see that our eggs have now hatched [Music] the parents have now moved them to the front of the tank and this is very common for ramps to do what they like to do is hatch their eggs and then move them into like a little sand divot or some other area of the tank where they're going to be able to take care of those wrigglers now you can see below this male is a ton of wrigglers he's been doing a really good job of keeping them all organized and the female has also been doing a really good job of fighting off those endless as well as a male he's also been doing his part in fighting those endless off but they're both still working really well together as a team to take care of this fry now i have been leaving the lights on 24 7 because i found that in the past when i don't leave the lights on 24 7 when they have fry the lights turn off at night and then the pair gets confused and when they wake up in the morning they eat their eggs and it just doesn't work very well it also means that the endless might have time to eat the wrigglers while they're asleep so it's just not worth it for me so i keep the lights on 24 7 while i do have fry this fry are actually starting to freeze swim now and i'm assuming by tomorrow there should be all free swimming and at that point we can give them a feeding so adding the dither fish i think is a good idea because it's made the pair really have to work hard to keep their fries safe and it also means that the pair is not taking the aggression out on each other rather they're taking the aggression out on the endless and aren't bickering and eating their fry that way so the reason i'm showing you this is so that you guys can also compare the two methods that we're using to see which one you wanted to do but anyways enough on this pair let's get back to our auto feeding system so overnight i was thinking about how the system was going to work and i was trying to think of any way that the system would fail and cause us to lose our fry and the thing that i was thinking about mostly is the amount of food going into the container and the consistency of the feedings so one pitfall in the current design is that electrical timer because it's only allowing us to use 30 minute intervals twice a day so i ended up going to the hardware store and picking up a different timer now this is a digital timer and the thing that's good about this time is it's down to the minute i can schedule up to 14 different feedings throughout the day for minute intervals if i want or two minute intervals or three minute intervals and it should work really well so i ended up scheduling a few different feedings i ended up scheduling feedings for 6am 8am 11am 1pm 3pm 5pm p.m 9 p.m 11 p.m 2 a.m and 4 a.m so these are only gonna be small feedings as i went ahead and also tested the flow rates of how much liquid the peristaltic pump can push through so a full tray this stuff should last overnight and my plan is to actually keep the lights on on this system so the rams don't have a long period without food and can constantly eat and grow over that first couple of days which is very very crucial i think so i added the analog timer plugged our system back in and now i guess it's just a waiting game until i fry are ready to go okay so while we wait to test out our auto feeding system and wait for those little german blue rams to mature and get ready for their first feeding i want to come back to this tank and show you something very special if you have a look you can see that our little baby black cramps have all taken off and started to free swim [Music] so [Music] now the parents are doing a fantastic job of taking care of these guys and moving them throughout the aquarium to help them find infusoria and other little microorganisms that they can eat as their first food at this size these guys are still too small to eat baby brown shrimp and for the first couple of days they will need to eat microorganisms last night when i did see these guys starting to take off i added a clump of java moss as this would contain some infusoria and this morning when i came in i also decided it'd be a good idea to add a few vinegar eels to the aquarium as the fry might be able to eat these and of course they did so i'm really happy with how this pear is going they're doing a fantastic job of taking care of this fry and i'm almost certain they're going to get these guys through the juvenile stage so we'll catch up with these guys in a couple days time and try and give them their first feeding of baby brown shrimp and then after this we'll probably strip the fry add them to a different container and let the pair move on to creating their next batch okay so it's now a few days later and the day has finally come where we're going to get to test out this auto feeding system now you can see if we come over to our little container that all of our rams have now hatched and they've began free swimming so not all of them have began free swimming but some of them have about 25 percent of them have and i'm guessing by the end of the day they'll all be free swimming so it's now come time to take these guys and put them into their container now you can see i've swapped out the container for a little bit of a smaller one and this is because i don't want the rams having to swim too far to get their food and i was thinking that by the ramps being in a smaller container the auto feeding system will work a little bit better because the food will be right in front of their faces so i was also over the last few days trying out different foods in our previous reservoir and something that wasn't working with that reservoir was that it was a rectangular shape and the air stone wasn't really helping to circulate the food around and any particulate amount of food like egg yolk or fried dust that added to the mixture would just eventually settle on one side of the container and then the food would not get transferred over to the fry box so i've decided to use a different method and i've gone with something similar to my branch hatcheries by using a water bottle so you can see here i just cut the end of this off drilled a few holes in the side ran a bit of airline tubing through the holes and suspended this guy next to our pump the reason i've done this is because i can drop an air stone down the bottom of the bottle and i can also drop the inlet for the peristaltic pump down the bottom and because of the shape of this container all that food will circulate really well like a baby branch of hatchery and won't settle down the bottom and will all get fed eventually throughout the feeding schedule so you can see how i've set this up i've added a stone on top of both the air stone and the feeding tube to keep them down the bottom of the container and you might be wondering why i've used air hose tubing and it was because it was the only thing i had in the fish room that day so i set this up gave it a quick test and it was working perfectly so i think this is going to be the final model of our auto feeding system and i'm really excited to get to use this and try it out so what i did was i added all of our baby rams into our container set the container up with a bit of java moss so that they could rest on that if they wanted to and set the container up as well with an air stone for oxygenation and everything was looking good i then created our mixture of food you can see here for the first day i've only added infusoria and i also added some egg yolks so this is just some boiled egg and i've just taken the egg yolk and mixed it up in the water to create lots of tiny particles and i've added this to our food reservoir so everything's set up perfectly i went ahead and i also gave the rams a manual feeding myself and i've left these guys for the rest of the day so i can come back in the afternoon and see how the feeding system's going okay and so while we wait to see the results of our auto feeding system i thought we could quickly come back to our blue black ram breeding pair and have a look at their fryer you can see here that the parents have now moved them behind the terracotta pots and have been helping the friday graze among the java moss they're still very protective over these fry and have been making sure that the endless don't come near i thought now that these guys are a couple of days old that it was finally time to give them some baby brown shrimp so you can see here i went ahead and gave them their first feeding a baby brine shrimp and they seem to be eating them it's really hard to get a good look at these guys because they are behind those terracotta pots but the fries stomach's filled up with that nice orange color which means they have been eating the baby brine shrimp so we're gonna give these guys another couple of days in this tank before we strip them out so they can put on some more size and then we can let the parents move on to their next batch okay so it's now the next morning and it's now day two of our friday free swimming and so far so good there is a few things that i've learned from the system which you're gonna find out with all your systems that you set up you're gonna make mistakes at the start but luckily we got this mistake early and it wasn't too big of a deal now what this mistake was is our feeding tube overnight was dosing food and as this food was dosing it was clogging up the sponge at the back now it's not enough that it was clogging it up to overflow the tank but it just raised that water level a little bit and because this water level was raised that feeding tube then went underneath the water level if that makes sense so it created like a little vacuum and what it was doing was it was sucking up fry in between feedings so the fry would get sucked up into that airline tubing for like an hour and then the next feeding would happen and it would dose just dead fry into the tank now i'm sure this wasn't good for the water quality i don't think it made too big of a deal though but that was killing a few fries so when i came in this morning there was probably about 30 that were dead that had obviously got sucked up by this tube because that's how i saw them but for the most part besides that issue the rest of the fry seem to be doing good they're all pretty confidently free swimming it hasn't been long enough to call us a success so we need to get these guys onto baby brine shrimp i have just tried to feed them some baby brown shrimp this morning they haven't started to eat that yet but i also fed them some microwaves and i do believe that we're eating those so what we're going to be doing is resetting our food reservoir and in today's recipe we're going to be using egg yolk more infusoria and we're going to also add some micro worms so another thing you guys can learn from this is you have to upgrade your foods so you can see today we're adding a little bit of a larger food so those fish when they're ready can start to eat that larger food because otherwise if we keep them on egg yolk and infusoria they're eventually going to get too big for those foods and they're just gonna starve and that can happen really quickly so you need to be really diligent with your feedings and try and make sure you're constantly upgrading the food until you're onto baby brown shrimp i was gonna use vinegar eels but i don't have a culture that's ready so it would have been nice to have vinegars today because they definitely would have been able to eat the vinegar eels but hopefully the egg yolk the powdered food and the infusoria are enough to get them through to the microworm stage once they're on micro worms they're going to be pretty quickly able to take baby brine shrimp and then we're just going to be chilling so everything seems to be working perfectly and i just really hope this works we also just today got another spawn from a blue black round pair that's quite large and if i can get these guys through on this method i'm gonna be able to hopefully do that with our blue black rams and let's just hope that we come back this afternoon to some more success and then hopefully tomorrow morning they're all eating baby brian shrimp and doing really well okay so it's now the afternoon and i'm just reporting back that our rams are doing fantastic it's almost like everything's going too perfectly so the rams are eating really well i've had no major die off since this morning they're all eating mostly microworms at this point and i have seen a few of them eat some baby brown shrimp so just looking at them now i mean they're doing really really good i think that this system is going to work but we're not going to wrap this up until tomorrow morning i think tomorrow morning when i come in is going to be the final test whether this worked obviously i have to get these guys up to juvenile stage and sell them for it to have actually worked but just so we can wrap this video up and you can see whether this method actually properly worked or not any observations i've done two manual feedings myself today and this thing has just been doing all the work for me it's actually made the process so easy and it's never been this easy breeding rams i mean i've been super stressed the past couple of times trying to get back in time and i've never fed this amount of food into a tank because i can't get here enough like this thing's been feeding all day for me and filling in all those extra gaps it's just been working perfectly so the thing that's best about this auto feeding system is i'm dosing right on top of them so all those egg yolk particles and infusoria and worms are just falling straight on top of them and that means that they're just falling through the water column and the fryer getting a chance to eat them so yeah i'm just super satisfied with how this is going and yeah i guess nothing else to report back we'll catch up in the morning and we'll see how everything's going fingers crossed everything will be going perfectly and then we can wrap the video up [Music] and as you guys would have gathered from the montage it's now the next morning and our baby rams are doing fantastic they've all started the eat baby branch room and we haven't had any losses i've had like one or two die off but i think that's just to natural causes and we've got hundreds of these guys in this container so i'm super happy that this method's worked i'm absolutely relieved that we found a way to breed our rooms without leaving them in with the parents and now we can take out all of our spawns hatch them out and use this method and we're just going to be able to go crazy with this method like as long as we're pulling spawns consistently we're going to be able to keep reducing them and this has just been the easiest way to breed rams in my opinion i mean i know a lot of people when they raise rams like to put them in bowls and manually change the water and manually feed them but in my opinion now with this method that's just not a good method anymore at least in my opinion i mean for other people it might work but i think they're about methods so so i hope this video was really easy to follow and i hope that you guys learned something from it and i might have sparked like an idea in your head on how to do this let me know down below if you want me to make a video in the future on how to exactly make the system because i'm definitely gonna have to develop some kind of way to do multiple feedings into multiple tanks and i'm definitely gonna play around with this a little bit more but yeah thank you guys so much for watching this video i really do appreciate it i hope you guys learned something and i'll see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: KeepingFishSimple

Views: 70,891

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Id: -DgB7PBEXHQ

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 28 2021