How to retrieve Bangaii Babies Question

[npaden]

My male bangaii is 20 days into his term. I noticed what appear to be little eyes looking out of his mouth this morning. I'm trying to decide the best way to collect the babies and then the best place to keep them.

On keeping the babies. I have a 415 gallon tank with a 50 gallon refugium in the sump that has quite a bit of water flowing through it. I also have a 15 gallon refugium with only a little water flowing through it hooked up to the same system that is nearly 2 years old. I also have a small CPR in tank refugium (maybe 6" X 12" X 12") that I could set up to keep the babies in.

I think the 15 gallon refugium would have an excellent variety of live foods for the babies to munch on that would supplement my feeding them, but it would also make it harder to feed them. The in tank refugium would make feeding them much easier but not allow them any natural live foods. I think I'm going to try the rotifer sized golden pearls to feed them and if they won't go for them I have a friend who is hatching out enriched baby brine shrimp I could feed them.

On catching them - I don't know if I should attempt to catch the male and put him in 15 gallon refugium or the tiny CPR refugium or wait it out until he spits them out and hope to catch the babies in the 415 gallon tank. That seems pretty impossible as the water flow in the tank is fairly high. (6,000 gph)

Any suggestions? I probably need to do something tonight as he should be releasing soon. I didn't ask earlier or get my hopes up because he had aborted the previous 4 attempts. This attempt comes a full 6 months since his last attempt so I guess he finally got serious about it.

Thanks in advance, Nathan

[FMarini]

Nate:
I have seen this huge tank in the picts of your house. AMazing.
So gettin the male??? well you really have 2 choices, if the male releases the fry they will become tankfood and some of them will make it to the overflow and rockwork. You might end up w/ 5 or 10% of the total brood. The male will release the fry in the next few days..so you should really decide on which way to tgo.
I do like you slow flow refugium(the 15gal one) it sounds like agood place for the fry once they are released.
Catching the male....
here is a post by Guy on his technique. Apparently others say it works, so that why i can only tell you to give it a try. Other than this i would try to catch the fish early in the morning before he wakes up or late at night (this is the Guy technique), eitherway, if you don't succeed the male might spit out the fry. So your call on this.
The rotifer sized goldern pearls don't work, they don't contain enuf nutrition to keep the fry going. My guess is your sand bed might, and if you don't want to raise enriche baby brine, you can try these fish roe or pawn roe which others have written about.
http://archive.reefcentral.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=38579

Good luck
frank

[npaden]

Thanks for the advice Frank. I have the male caught and in the little CPR in tank refugium. I stuck some caulerpa prolifera in there and he doesn't seem to mind hanging out in there. He doesn't do a lot of swimming around when carrying eggs anyway.

He is at 21 days now so I would imagine he should spit out the eggs tonight. I've got a local source for bbs lined up and will try to talk to my LFS about the frozen prawn eggs.

Thanks again for the input and thanks for the compliment on the tank. It is still just a couple months old but hopefully it will look nice in a couple years.

Thanks, Nathan