Minnow Breeding: Success!

June 15 2008: Okay so there’s some backstory to go through first. After a few weeks of no activity in the minnow tank we gave up on the idea and put them back in the main tank. Only to discover an incredibly useful article on how to breed small characins (a family the minnows belong to) which gave detailed instructions on what we should be doing. So we decided to try again, this time following these instructions. We blacked out the smaller tank with bin liners and placed one female in there on her own. We’ll fed her on a diet of live and frozen daphnia and bloodworm until she appeared to be carrying eggs, at which point we were planning on adding a male to the tank and seeing what happens.

Before I go any further, the article can be found here from Yahoo! answers and here from the original website.

BUT before we put the male in the tank (after the female had got incredibly fat) we found something. Baby minnows! Ultra small (too small to photograph) tiny baby minnow. No more than a couple of millimetres in length. What had happened, we decided, was that the minnows in there previously had indeed spawned but due to the baby minnows before so absolutely small, we hadn’t seen them until a couple of days ago. They would’ve been living on bacteria in the tank. Upon spying the new arrivals we hastily moved the female back into the main tank as minnows have been known to eat babies. The new babies are being fed on liquid baby food (insuphoria) for the time being and will move onto daphnia next week. As soon as they are large enough to be seen on a photograph, I’ll be putting some up.

For now, here’s some photos of what the breeding tank now looks like:

We also got more minnows (yes more!) for the main tank. We bought 14 more from an aquarium shop as it was decided the previous shoal of 8 minnows wasn’t enough for them. They like larger shoals. We now have 22 (not counting the new babies.)