Bluegill Spawn and Fry

[junker68]

I've been lurking here for a while reading and absorbing much of the information contained here.
I've got a 125 gallon native tank, stocked with a couple of Perch, 4 Bluegill/Sunfish and two small grass pickerel.
For the past two seasons the female Perch has laid a ribbon of eggs with no successful fertilization.
Two of the male Bluegills have always built nests, also with no success. Well this year one of the males started building a nest, the female came over, they did their little dance. Today I noticed a bunch of teeny - tiny little fry floating up and down along the bottom of the nest!
There are alot! Got to be over a thousand, if not more.

I removed some from the nest and placed, I guess about a hundred, of them into a suspended netting.

For scale, the pot in the video is about an inch in length.

See attached video.

[video=youtube_share;W2UQsNMn0p8]http://youtu.be/W2UQsNMn0p8[/video],

Dwayne

 

[warmouth]

cool sorry I cant bring up the video

 

[JK Monster Fish]

It works for me, also. Congrats on the spawn its really cool

 

[junker68]

Well, I screwed up royally.

I was going to do what Michael suggested in a day or two, when I actually saw the fry doing more than acting like "Mexican jumping beans." I have an extra tank, they were going to go in there but I was also going to let a bunch stay in the tank to see what percentage survived.

The video above, was a large minnow net hanging from the edges of the top of the aquarium.

I topped off the water level, to submerge the net as much as possible, but by doing that, my return filtered water line was under water. So, instead of causing a disturbance on top of the water and putting oxygen back into the water, the water was returned below the water line, hence no oxygen was going back into the tank.

Well, when I woke up the next morning the fish were close to starving for oxygen, the fry did not make it but the fish were ok.

Man, was I bummed out...Lesson learned.