How to breed Pseudomugil furcatus (Forktailed Rainbows), and other ‘egg scattering’ Rainbowfish.
What you will need:
1) An established Aquarium
2) Dark Green Yarn
3) A Book
4) Scissors
5) Methylene blue (not 100% necessary)
6) Small Holding containers
7) Wire for hanging ‘Mop’ and egg/fry container
Lets get started!
Here are some of the supplies:
Wrap the book with the yarn about 50 times:
Cut the yarn at one end:
It should look like this, set one strand of yarn aside:
Use the extra strand to tie the top creating a ‘Mop’
Hang the Mop inside your tank. You can use wire or another method to do this. The Mops are great because they are easy to search for eggs, rather then digging through establish plants throughout your Aquarium. You can also float it with a piece of Styrofoam.
Check the Mop Daily or Every other day for Eggs. Fresh Eggs will be clear:
Carefully remove the eggs and place them in a small container with tank water. A pill bottle works great. Add one or 2 small drops of Methylene blue into the container. (1 drop in a pill bottle) The Methylene blue helps keep fungus from attacking the eggs as well as helps determine the Fertile and infertile Eggs:
Hang the Container in the tank so that the Temperature will be stable. I find that more eggs survive if I have a very small amount of air in the container. To do this I use and air pump with an air flow adjuster on it. The air keeps the water from getting stagnant, helping prevent fungus and other problems.
Monitor the eggs. Healthy Eggs will look speckled. Bad eggs will be milky or fuzzy with fungus. Remove the bad eggs. This is what your healthy eggs will look like after several days:
Pseudomugil furcatus Eggs- (photo by Kim Carey)
Check Daily for Hatched Eggs. Fry are small and can easily be sucked out with a turkey baster, just be careful not to hurt them. You can place them into another small container with tank water and hang it just like the Egg setup.
Pseudomugil furcatus Fry- (photo by Kim Carey)
Fry are extremely small. Furcatas are able to eat baby brine shrimp and finely powdered foods from the start. But some Rainbow sp. are even smaller and will require rotifers or vinegar eels.
**Make sure you carefully clean out the fry container as it can get dirty quick in such a small environment**
As they grow you can move them to various containers based on size. They are slow growers so its nice to have a separate tank setup just for raising these little guys.
As for the breeding environment for Furcatas, they aren’t too picky. I have a breeding group of 7 fish, 3 males and 4 females. The water is moderately hard and has a PH of 7.2. I generally get an egg every other day, but sometime I will find several eggs in one day.
Most Rainbow sp. like planted tanks, but these Mops can replace plants. I have seen these fish bread in bare tanks with several floating Mops.
Hope this helps someone!
