Vendors with AUL?
- Thread starter the lion who ate the sun
- Start date
I suspect the price reflects the availability, which is very limited and probably only a few fish at best available. As with any hard to breed large bodied fish, availability will fluctuate widely depending on a chance successful spawning every few years. AUL are one of those fish that might not successfully spawn for 5 or 10 years.
I have always thought that the spawning was not natural... with fish like these, why risk it?
Why risk captive spawning? How's $1,000 per grow-out sound? Fecundity is 50 to 100 eggs per clutch so, looking at that potential income is hands down better than 99% of other captive-spawned species.
Not natural and Captive spawning. I'm not sure what you both are referring to. Do you mean artificially inducing them to spawn? Either way there are no shortcuts to getting them to breed. They have to be in large outdoor ponds with recirculation to mimic their natural spawning beds of Vallisneria (a type of eel grass). Without some flow they don't spawn and more importantly the eggs don't do well. Eggs take 3 weeks to hatch and larvae another 3-4 weeks before fee swimming so a lot of time for things to go wrong.
Their spawning is triggered by a change in photo-period. This and the other conditions can be mimicked in an indoor closed loop system. My hatchery had 33K gallons indoors in which I've bred several aussie species. In dealing with difficult species, I've employed the use of either Oviprim or used a parthenogenic technique to produce viable eggs to hatch out in multi-size hatchers. I never said it was easy (or always successful) but, it can be done with the proper technology.
Yes I'm sure there are ways, I'd guess a few people might be giving it a thought. I heard Shedd aquarium once had to do a massive water change in their lungfish display using cooler water and they spawned some eggs but weren't fertilised.
