We woke up today to find about 10 new Lime Green Endler fry in their tank today. This is our 3rd batch of fry since our purchase 4 pairs of Lime Green Endlers from Adrian Hernandez (AdrianHD) just over 2 months ago.
All but one of the females that we purchased are dropping their fry within a couple of days of each other with the third dropping a few days later.
The first batch of fry we had shortly after delivery of or Lime Green Endlers was quite small.
The second was much larger with too many fry to count.
This morning is the third batch of fry. The original females are huge and we knew they were about ready to drop their fry.
Now that we have had one of the females drop their fry we know that the others will drop theirs in the next few days.
As far as the first batch of fry that were born just over 2 months ago, the females, 6 of them, are now about an inch long in size and are gravid. They should have their first fry soon as they are getting quite fat.
The males have all started to show their colors but they have not developed full color yet.
Our second batch of Lime Green Endlers are now about 1/2″ long and we have too many to count.
We expect to get quite a few Endlers in this batch because the original females are quite fat and the first group of female fry are really showing signs of being very pregnant.
With the number of Endlers being produced so far we expect to get quite a few new Endlers in the next few days which should give us the opportunity to start offering Lime Green Endlers by spring 2015.
UPDATE: It’s been a few hours since we entered this post and we have now removed 20-30 fry from the main tank and added them to the fry tank. There are several fry hiding in places we can’t get to also that have not been transferred to the fry tank.
Why Transfer the Fry from the Breeding Tank?
We usually try to transfer fry from our breeding tanks to fry tanks as soon as we can catch them. While Endlers are known for being somewhat kind to their fry we feel that more are eaten than most people realize.
Due to the number of fry being dropped by Endlers we feel most people don’t realized that some of the fry have become a snack.
We have observed that the very large females seem chase the small fry around indicating to us that they have probably made a meal of some fry sometime in the past.
Another reason why we transfer the fry to a fry tank as soon as possible is because we don’t want the fry to have to compete with the adult Endlers for food.
The last reason why we transfer the fry is that we try to have very good control over the genetics and breeding of our Endlers. As the Endlers get older it becomes increasingly harder to net specific fish. Separating the fry helps us to maintain good undiluted genetics.
The process may seem to be a lot of extra work but it really isn’t because the fry tend to shoal together making it easy to get several fry in one quick scoop.