And I want them to stop!
I maintain a ~500g native (Minnesota) tank for some clients, it has about 8 bluegills and one largemouth in the tank. There used to be more variety, crappies and perch as well, but our Bluegills have been spawning on a regular basis (roughly every two weeks) for the last several months. Forgive me for knowing very little about the basics of their breeding, but I never wanted to be breeding sunfish! After a little reading, I believe the fish at the nest is the male? I do not know which fish he is breeding with, the rest of the sunfish are all in equally poor condition because of the aggression of the male at the nest.
Really, at first I thought it was incredibly cool, especially when we had thousands of fry in the tank, but the male guarding the eggs is wildly aggressive and his habit of killing the other fish is becoming a very expensive problem. I try to siphon the eggs from the tank when I see them, but the massive number of eggs are very difficult to remove. We're looking for a solution.
Has anyone dealt with this before? It has gotten to the point where the eggs are on almost every piece of rock and driftwood in the aquarium (an area well over four feet across) and it would be impossible to remove them all.
I maintain a ~500g native (Minnesota) tank for some clients, it has about 8 bluegills and one largemouth in the tank. There used to be more variety, crappies and perch as well, but our Bluegills have been spawning on a regular basis (roughly every two weeks) for the last several months. Forgive me for knowing very little about the basics of their breeding, but I never wanted to be breeding sunfish! After a little reading, I believe the fish at the nest is the male? I do not know which fish he is breeding with, the rest of the sunfish are all in equally poor condition because of the aggression of the male at the nest.
Really, at first I thought it was incredibly cool, especially when we had thousands of fry in the tank, but the male guarding the eggs is wildly aggressive and his habit of killing the other fish is becoming a very expensive problem. I try to siphon the eggs from the tank when I see them, but the massive number of eggs are very difficult to remove. We're looking for a solution.
Has anyone dealt with this before? It has gotten to the point where the eggs are on almost every piece of rock and driftwood in the aquarium (an area well over four feet across) and it would be impossible to remove them all.
