Celestial pearl danios (potential project)

[Hendre]

Hey guys, I have an 8 gallon tank I am soon to aquascape and am ordering some CPD's with another local forum member for only about $1.50 each and usually cost $3-4 or more (roughly with conversion)

So they will be my scape fish all fine and dandy. But looking at the price I have been thinking that breeding them would be profitable.

To make a long story short I have been looking at breeding something for a while to help the young lad that is me afford to keep fish and get more plants, wood, equipment and all of that. I was looking at shrimp but these danios caught my eye in more than one.

I can borrow some money from my parents to get this started if needs be, I am keeping some regardless if I'm making a project or not.

What I am looking at doing is using a few small plastic containers, to save money, potentially fitted with sponge filters and heaters, and definitely for rearing tanks. For food I can get walter worms and try culturing green water.

So now here I need some help
What sort of container size would you guys use for breeding these fish? I was thinking 2-5 gallons for spawning and 5-10 for eventual rearing of the fry to a sellable size.

Are the fry easy to raise in your experience?

Do you think it would be possible to make a little money off of these fish? there is demand for them here

Any tips or extra info on the topic would be appreciated. Thanks guys

 

[Wailua Boy]

Ive been able to breed fairly large numbers in heavily planted 10g aquarium but larger tanks would probably be better.

 

[Sanman]

Check out this guy he breeds tons of cpd's. https://www.youtube.com/user/lbknuggs

 

[Sanman]

Somewhere in there is how he does the cpds..

 

[Fish on Fire]

Livebearers would be the way to go if you wanted to have your hobby pay for itself. Buy some nice strains to start colonies with and let them go in heavily planted 20-40 gallon breeders. Guppies would be best.

 

[Wailua Boy]

Livebearers are popular and pretty easy to raise but they are more labor intensive. The danios are similar to other egg layers and keeping the young fish well fed is the hard part for most people.

 

[Fish on Fire]

Livebearers are popular and pretty easy to raise but they are more labor intensive. The danios are similar to other egg layers and keeping the young fish well fed is the hard part for most people.

I actually think the opposite. If you've got the tank planted well enough for the babies to hide and survive, they aren't a problem to raise at all. And they do fine growing up on powdered food, IME.

 

[Wailua Boy]

Thats true but in sense of achieving larger more frequent spawns, the egg layers seem to be less labor intensive. IME

F Fish on Fire

 

[Fish on Fire]

Thats true but in sense of achieving larger more frequent spawns, the egg layers seem to be less labor intensive. IME

F Fish on Fire

Yeah, true, that's the only downside to livebearers, fewer numbers.

 

[Hendre]

Ive been able to breed fairly large numbers in heavily planted 10g aquarium but larger tanks would probably be better.

Is this keeping a colony in there or putting fish in for breeding only?

Check out this guy he breeds tons of cpd's. https://www.youtube.com/user/lbknuggs

Somewhere in there is how he does the cpds..

Thanks I'll check it out

Livebearers would be the way to go if you wanted to have your hobby pay for itself. Buy some nice strains to start colonies with and let them go in heavily planted 20-40 gallon breeders. Guppies would be best.

Thanks for the idea but I'm doing CPD's since I'll have a colony in a tank already and will take fish out for breeding purposes

Livebearers are popular and pretty easy to raise but they are more labor intensive. The danios are similar to other egg layers and keeping the young fish well fed is the hard part for most people.

That's my main worry. I can order walter worm cultures, these seem to be much easier to culture and prepare to feed young fish than BBS. The advantage of egg layers is that you have a batches of fry that are the same size unlik livebearers that may have multiple different sizs of fry in a tank and inbreeding may well occur

Thats true but in sense of achieving larger more frequent spawns, the egg layers seem to be less labor intensive. IME

F Fish on Fire

This is what I have seen as well