When will dad eat his kids?

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Oz fish guy

Jack Dempsey
MFK Member
Jan 23, 2018
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So ive been wondering when will big daddy see his offspring a threat to his dominance? How long can i keep them in the same tank as the parents? Forever is the answer im looking for aha
 
So ive been wondering when will big daddy see his offspring a threat to his dominance? How long can i keep them in the same tank as the parents? Forever is the answer im looking for aha


Unfortunately you will have problems exactly when don't know.
 
I hate when I fail at breeding fish, I worked a month on these silver dollar. BOOM looked in and saw they were gone.
 
Bugger. So no one has had success even raising afew off spring in with parents? Mine are about 20 mm.
 
I had a breeding pair of Jags (I assume Big Daddy is a managuense) and raising young with the parents in a 150 gal tank for a fairly long time.
To me a successful spawn is ending up with 20 or 25 really healthy, robust young, even if it starts with a thousand eggs and fry.

The largest problem is when they are ready to spawn again, then both parents may see the fry as a threat to the newest spawn. So it is usually better to first remove the male to separate tank, preventing a new spawn, or his hormones getting the best of him, and eating fry. But....
I had more trouble with fry eating each other when all together.
So after a while I just ended up getting a bunch of grow out tanks, and separating fry by size, so all the females wouldn't be eaten by the (usually ) faster growing males
I've also had incidences where fry (if I ended up with too many), start to eat the parents, and the parents barely protested.
I had to remove a male haitiensus to save his life,when fry ate a gaping hole in his side.
 
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Wtf thats messed up.. i have seen the fry pick at the males scales before but i would never of had thought that the fry could chow down on the parentals. Thats nuts. cheers for that
 

It all starts innocently enough, but large groups of fry required lots of constant, adequate feedings throughout the day,
After these type incidents, I started allowing large tracts of algae to grow in all my fry rearing tanks, attached refugiums that spilled planktonic foods constantly throughout the day into fry tanks, and fed brine shrimp and other fry foods at least 5 times per day.
 
Yeah that is rather incredible. I let my dedicated breeding tanks grow weird **** but my manganese has bread in my nice shiny show tank so been feeding egg yolk and mozzy larvae to the fry. Ill definitely watch out for that cannibalism next time they breed. Cheers mate
 
When he steps on one of their Legos. :)

joking aside, Duanes was right when saying usually around the time they are ready to spawn again, but I would usually have a few juvies evade being eaten and grow to sub-adulthood.

I too have never seen the behavior of fry feasting on the parents, thats incredible.
 
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