I know this is an old thread, but just in case someone does a search in the future.
Belansox are a challenging fish to keep.
Breeding them is easy, just like any livebearer. A full grown pair will drop about about 40 or so fry per month. If the parents are well fed, they tend not to immediately eat their fry. So you can home home from work, and net fry out , away from the parents. The fry are quite large for fry.
The big challenge is providing enough live food for the fry to eat. Big cultures of dapnia help a lot.
If you do not give the fry enough to eat (and they are very hungry), you will reach a situation where they start cannibalizing each other, then in about 3 days or so, you go from about 40 fry to 3 fry.
You can train Belansox to eat frozen food. Not too difficult. Plenty of aeration to keep the food moving. Bloodwords are a good one to start with. I have gotten them to eat frozen brine shrimp and mysis too.
The best way to wean them to frozen food is to put one fish per container (you can use a critter keeper or a 1 gallon container, just frequently water change) and spend about 3-4 weeks "training" the fish. If you try to train multiple fish in the same tank, you will most likely get cannibalism.. So I would usually net out about 8 fry, put them in seperate containers and train them to eat frozen food.. The rest of the fry would be in a 20 gallon, left to fend for themselves.. I could get maybe 4-5 out of them after the cannibalization.
Once they are on frozen food, I did not have much trouble with cannibalism, as you can keep the bellie full..
My belansox bred in freash water, they did not seem picky at all about water conditions.. Oh yea and I had lots of floating hornwort for the babies to hide in. Lastly.. this is a very hard fish to find. The females get much larger than the males.. If you only get one pair, I recommend keeping them seperate until you train them on frozen food.. Otherwise, you risk the female eating the male. In fact, I would put the pair together, let them mate, then pull out the male just to be on the safe side.. Once you have some fry, you can relax a bit, as there is less stress about losing a fish..
In short, this is a fun fish, but a ton of work. The other downside is that since it is so predatory, it is hard to even give offspring away. The guy that I got mine from.. he had a few adults that he would feed his killifish culls too. When they gave birth, he would put the babies on aquabid..
