ok mate here goes , you need to have some floating cover as they will use this to deposit the eggs in , anything will do whatever you can get hold of , caves or well structured setup to allow fish to get out of the way when being chassed ect. pull out the heater as your tank is in the front room and ambiant room temps will be enough to mimic sub-tropical , if your room gets freezing then set the heater at around 16-18deg.
personally i would add a few indian almond leaves to the tank to soften the water and is also known to stimulate breeding in certain fish and has anti-bacterial propeties , they will be needed to heal the fish as fights break out.
this next step is optional - when i bred them the thinking was to mimic nature as close as possable in order to sitmulate spawning , to do this as per nature we done as follows.
from october through to march i fitted a sieo pump near the surface and removed most of the floating cover , we do this to simulate the wet season in assam ,where when the rain comes it makes the streams where these fish run fast , the water is oxegen rich fairly neutral in hardness.
from march to october i removed the seio pump and added a lot of water lettuce to the surface , and a great big hand full of indian almond leaves in the tank. we do this step to simulate the dry season , in the dry season the streams dry up into pools , the pools become lower in oxogen and lower in ph as the dry season progresses, leaves fall into the pools and vegitation covers the surface , you can also drop the water level in the tank if you wish.
it is in this dry period that this fish spawns in nature , a few week after the pumps turned off you will notice aggresion levels increase , as summer comes round and the ambiant temps start to raise they fish will start showing signs of spawing , they do this spawning dance each evening for a few weeks , if you can see a defanite pair at this stage you can remove the others , when ambiant temps make the water temp 23deg the will spawn within a few weeks , some spawn all in one go ,some have been observed to spawn in several batches right throughout the summer.
now i said that this was an optional step ,as it now seams that pulchra can spawn year round , and someone else managed to breed them just last week
so you can if you wish set the tank so that is is at a simulated year your summer , i.e set a heater to 23-deg cover surface with plants and add indian almond leaves ,
personally i am still following the old method as i belive that a winter break is highly benificial for sub-tropical species. but this is just what i prefer , you can do it either way. but we may not see an adverse effect to a high year round temp until next year , we may see some fish suffer from bacterial infection as rainbows do without a winter break .
i think that covers the basics but if you need me to clarify anything at all then just shout
cheers col
