400 post met ocellaris - Page 4

Kathy55g · #76 06/24/2006, 02:32 PM

Usually 4-6+ months for Ocellaris, longer for Perculas.

yellowtruck75 · #77 06/24/2006, 03:51 PM

Wow that long I didn't realize. I assume thats why you guys have so many setups, so that you can get several patches at a time going and have a semi constant output.

David M · #78 06/25/2006, 10:22 AM

That is the idea

IN THEORY I should get to a point where I have a regular supply of fish ready to go on a monthly basis. Cross fingers please

akbuuur · #79 06/25/2006, 11:09 AM

where do you usually sell these?

yellowtruck75 · #80 06/25/2006, 11:24 AM

I might be wrong thinking this but once the process is setup and consistent, that should be a nice little side income.

David M · #81 06/25/2006, 01:12 PM

Quote:

that should be a nice little side income

Actually I have dreams of it being a little more than that

I sell them to local stores. Once that market is saturated I can start worling towards LA, I'd have to go there to wholesale them off anyway. There are 30 lfs between me and the wholesalers. With any luck the ocellaris will never make it to 104th St. The tomato's yes, but hopefully not the oc's

flame83 · #82 06/25/2006, 01:24 PM

Wow pretty intersting setup! hey just curious i use to breed fresh water fish and only got 10 to 25 cents a piece, just wondering how prices are for the clowns in wholesale these days? again nice setup and progress. ahh wish i had the money to take a jab at it right now, but maybe in the future.

colby · #83 06/25/2006, 01:48 PM

Congrats David. That is so awesome and I can't wait to see the pics pf your new set up with fish in it. Did you say that you had the 400 fish in a 5 gallon? If so that is impressive. Tons of water changes no doubt.

Best of luck,
Colby

Kathy55g · #84 08/07/2006, 07:38 AM

So how are those fired up ocellaris doing, David? We haven't heard lately!

Dman · #85 08/07/2006, 07:59 AM

Indeed, do tell.

David M · #86 08/07/2006, 08:04 AM

It has become quite routine with hatches of 350-500 every 10-13 days ever since that first big one in April. Every once in a while there is a poor nest or lost hatch but for the most part it's been pretty consistent. I'd say I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 growing out and a good portion of that first hatch have already been sold. The new GO system is finally finished with only a few more minor "tweaks" being needed. In fact I just got the temp tanks switched over to the new sump and put the lights up yesterday. I will get some pics up when I have some time but it's been 14 hour days as I still have the "day job" and this week is gonna be the worst.

I plan to launch a major sales attack later this month targeting retailers in So Cal. The great news is that SDC is now selling 1/2" cb ocellaris for $7.75 !!!! Can you imagine that, 1/2" ???

Kathy55g · #87 08/07/2006, 11:54 AM

What is SDC?

I had a problem selling fish slightly smaller than 1" to a local shop that uses copper prophylactically in their fish only tanks--close to 50% died. Yet my fish are stubbornly not growing to the 1" mark. A watched fish never grows...

Maybe my broodstock is percula and not ocellaris...

Snarkys · #88 08/07/2006, 12:27 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by David M
That is the idea IN THEORY I should get to a point where I have a regular supply of fish ready to go on a monthly basis. Cross fingers please

that would be nice

David M · #89 08/07/2006, 11:06 PM

Quote:

Maybe my broodstock is percula and not ocellaris...

Not like it's hard to tell the difference

SDC: Sea Dwelling Creatures- probably the biggest fish in the pond

Pick up any copy of FAMA .

Kathy55g · #90 08/07/2006, 11:24 PM

Can you tell the difference? The percula with the really wide black stripes are an easy mark, but I look at what some call percs and they look ocellaris to me. I can't count dorsal spines because I don't know where they leave off. There are those tiny litle ones at the end....

My friend's ocellaris are completely clear orange with the usual stripes. My broodstock and its spawn have a lot of darkness in the orange parts, particularly on the dorsal side with the darkness gradually fading to clear orange at the belly. They must have come from different parts of the ocean, but are they perculas or ocellaris?

Geez.

r00onmac · #91 08/08/2006, 04:31 AM

kathy,

check out the eyes... ocellaris eyes are black center with a black ring around it making it look like they have a fairly large eye..

Percula have a black center with an orange ring...

i would say if they are getting their 3 stripes fairly quickly (<5 months) they are probably ocellaris... my percula baby didnt get his third stripe until 8-10 months and it is really still coming in a little coming up on 1 year old in sept...

David M · #92 08/08/2006, 08:44 AM

Yes the orange ring around the eye is pretty obvious but maybe there are exceptione to this, I don't know. r00 is right on about the stripe developement.

Now I do have a hybrid, 50/50 perc/oc. I will have to take a look and see what the eye ring is like. It grew out quickly with no delay on the third stripe. It is paired with a normal oc (female) and they are on about their 7th or 8th nest but I haven't tried to raise any yet. The nests are small and they lose them entirely around day 5 or 6.

MMoe · #93 08/08/2006, 09:27 AM

Good work! A note of caution. I don't know if you will run across this or not, I hope not, but back in the 70s when we started the first commercial clownfish hatchery (incidently our record of juvenile ocellaris from a single spawn was 953) we were plagued with a condition we dubbed "toxic tank syndrome". What would happen was that in a tank with several hundred small clownfish, we would notice that they began swimmng strangely, all bunching up and facing the water inlet, they would "shimmy" as they swam and would get very thin, as if their kidneys and salt processing capability broke down, and then within 24 hours all would be dead on the bottom of the tank. Now if we moved them to a new tank with new salt water when we first noticed the condition, then all would recover and begin eating by the next day. We experimented and moved half of the fish to a new tank, and the next day the half we did not move were dead and the half we moved were fine. The only answer I could come up with was that a bacteria, probalby a Vibro, established a colony in the tank, in the biological filter, the condition affected tanks most frequently and most virultently in tanks with biological filters, not unlike the one in your photo, that produced a toxin that killed the small fish. There was no indication that the bacteria itself was present on or in the fish. This was quite a problem for us, it was common in tanks with a lot of fish after several weeks of culture. We went to unfiltered tanks and water changes to reduce the incident of the syndrome and eventually to open systems in our larger hatcheries in the Keys and the Bahamas.

It may be as great a problem in these days of more effective filtration, good skimiming, massive carbon filtration, ozone application, antibiotic treatments, etc. but watch out for it, and if you see shimmy swimming and thinning out of the body, move the fish to a new system immediately. In some large multi tank systems the syndrome will manifest itself in one or more tanks, and the fish will survive to some extent, some dying, some hanging in there but declining in condition, and all facing the inlet and "shimmy swimming". I had problems selling fish to wholesalers because of this. Typically they would setup one tank for the tank raised clowns, and all would be well for the first shipment, and the second, but somewhere in the third to sxth shipment, they would begin to lose fish to this syndrom. I would advise them to rotate the tanks where they put the tank raised clowns and that usually corrected the problem.

You may not have this problem, I hope not, but it is possible, especially as you increase the numbers reared and and the numbers in a single system. And if you do you can work with carbon filtration, protein skimming and perhaps antibiotics (but antibiotics are a slippery slope and you don't want to have to rely on them) to reduce the problem.

Just a heads up....

Martin

MMoe · #94 08/08/2006, 09:29 AM

Note, I meant to say "It may not be as great a problem" in the second paragraph....

M

ediaz · #95 08/08/2006, 09:45 AM

Kathy since you are raising them

to tell if you have ocellaris or perculas here is a hint, ocellaris develop the second bar in a few days, perculas in a few years...

Kathy55g · #96 08/08/2006, 12:20 PM

OK, I have Oceys, then. They mostly have that second stripe in the first 9 days. Just gotta get them to grow.

Dman · #97 08/09/2006, 12:37 AM

I was begining to wonder, I thought my Percs were messing with me by having A. frenatus babies. SOunds like it could be a long growout sessions for them.

David, glad to hear things are picking up. It's getting pretty crazy around here as well (11 breeding regular and 7 sporadically)

MMoe, thanks for the advice and heads up. Are you going to be blessing us with your wisdom on a regular basis? As that would be extremely cool.

MMoe · #98 08/09/2006, 07:57 AM

Now that I'm once again involved somewhat with marine fish culture, I'll try to keep up with what's going on in the wider world, and the tropical marine fish culture world is getting wider all the time. I do eventually want to work with some of the pigmy angels and maybe some of the deep water basslets, it's fun to do new species. I now have all the plankton of Florida Bay available to me on an immediate basis, so I have good first larval food resources.

Martin

Angel*Fish · #99 08/09/2006, 09:58 AM

Great work DavidM!! And they are so darn cute! More clos-ups would be nice though

Quote:

Originally posted by MMoe
Now that I'm once again involved somewhat with marine fish culture, I'll try to keep up with what's going on in the wider world, and the tropical marine fish culture world is getting wider all the time. I do eventually want to work with some of the pigmy angels and maybe some of the deep water basslets, it's fun to do new species. I now have all the plankton of Florida Bay available to me on an immediate basis, so I have good first larval food resources.

Martin

It would be wonderful to see someone else have some success with the dwarf angels & preferably even go them one better --- please do it!

And you've surely already been welcomed to RC but I hope you don't mind an extra one - you are extra welcome anyway. Thanks for all your fine work.

To Reef Central

David M · #**100** 08/09/2006, 10:08 PM

The pair I got from Nicole put down a nest last night, it's not very tight but it's large. Looks like a good 400 anyway. My primary pair should lay tomorrow, guess it's time to ramp up the rots

16 days from transfer from LA to my tank, NOT bad