Breeding Bristlenose Plecos - Ready To Pull My Hair Out - Part 2

So… I’m starting a new blog.  This is fun!  I wanted to tell you that even though I’m STILL ready to pull my hair out… I have Bristlenose (from now on BN) BABIES!!!!

Of course, there’s many antics that go along with having the babies…  So y’all know I was DYING for something to breed…  The angels went on strike…  The Parkinsoni Rainbows - Well… They’re the only ones in the whole place that know what they’re doing!…  The Turqoise Rainbows (Lacustris) - They’re throwing eggs… but the guys must not know exactly what to do… because they’re all turning white!!!!…  The cories… I just haven’t had time to try the water mimicing rain thing lately… So that I’ll chalk up to my fault…  Now I come to the BN Plecos…

Did a water change (this was a couple weeks ago) and soon after there was a flurry of activity in the coconut shell area!  Well… I decided that I would not bother them, I would WAIT AND SEE… Do you know how hard it is to WAIT AND SEE?!?!?!?!  I mean, COME ON PEOPLE!!!  I’ve never had eggs from BN before!!!  So DAYS go by… We’re talking AT LEAST 2… (LOL) And I couldn’t take it ANY more!  I HAD to check it out…  I mean… the male had been vigilant at the coconut shell for a while now… So that was a good sign…  But I had never SEEN BN eggs before!!!!  I HAD to KNOW!!!  So I gently eased my hand and arm into the tank…  Although it doesn’t really matter… the way the Millenium Rainbow Juvies act… I think you could just plunge down in there and go for it!!!  They’re going to go crazy either way.  But I snuck down to the coconut shell and ever so gently eased it up to get a little peek…  And I saw this HUGE glob of yellow EGGS!!!  Well… I was SOOO excited… I dropped the coconut shell… Yup… you read this right… Angela DROPPED the SHELL with the EGGS in it!!!!  I mean how stupid can I be!?!?!?  So I picked it up gently again… and there they were!  I wasn’t sure how many… I figured a lot!  But Pleco eggs are HUGE!!!  I was looking for little teeny tiny eggs… like Angels or Rainbows… Well BN Pleco eggs blow that away by more than 100%!!!  They’re GIANT in comparison.  So I’m totally thrilled, I put the shell back down, get out of the water… and sit and watch.  The male comes right back and goes to fanning.  This is good!  So I leave them alone…

A day later… Time for another water change… and I noticed that the male wasn’t at his post!  So where was he???  I mean, it’s just a 20 gallon BARE BOTTOM tank!  There’s only 2 halves of clay pots, 2 halves of coconuts and one gladware container… Not like a huge hiding area…

I’m FREAKING out… because he’s NOT FANNING THE EGGS!!!  What do I do??!!??  Well, I got a specimen container and cleaned it out, and scooped up water out of te tank, and grabbed the eggs and put them in there.  Then I hung an airstone in the container to keep the water moving over the eggs, and hung the whole thing in the parent tank.  I believe that the Ramshorn snails ate some of the eggs which really made me man… but… Overall, problem solved!  …Except…

So where is he???!!!???  Well… I noticed that it must’ve been during the last water change… but I knocked the little cage off the bottom of the intake tube for the filter…  But he couldn’t have gotten up through there… I mean that tube’s so little, and it goes to the FILTER… Hello!!!!  Who watched Nemo???  This is a DEATH area… Like major MURDER, DEATH, KILL stuff going on in there… Not to mention… Madison is RIGHT over my shoulder… going Momma… Where’s the male??  And so now I’m thinking Horror show of sliced up Pleco right in front of my daughter!!!  So what do I DO???  I had to check, and she wasn’t going anywhere… So I took the filter bag out, and reached down in there… (blindly, because it’s a bottom tank up against a wall… So Blindly and in a contorted body movement to get back there…)  I’m feeling around the back of the filter, and the sides and the front and HOLY COW SOMETHING MOVED!!!  So now I’m Jumping back… because I’m thinking Pleco Sushi!  NOT Live Pleco… So now I’m thinking… HURT and MUTILATED Pleco… and still not wanting to pull him outta there in front of my daughter, but she doesn’t care because she’s still calling me a pansy for whining about how bad my head hurts from when the pleco moved and startled me and I bashed my head off the top tank… Gotta love kids… BACK to the story… He’s in there… and I can’t take the filter out from where it is, without draining 2 tanks!  So I gently scoop him up the side and out the outflow area of the filter…  and… He’s FINE!!!  I’m so relieved!  So I do the water change, put the cage back on and everything is fine… for the rest of the evening…

Until…

The next morning…  So the male is MISSING from his post AGAIN!!!  AND the cage is ON the filter…  So where can he be???!!!???  Well… after looking for quite a while, I decide to try the filter again… EVEN though the cage is ON!!!  And… HE was IN there!!!  So that means he must’ve jumped up the outflow of the filter in order to get in there…  Like a SALMON!!!  So I put him back in the tank AGAIN!!!

But what to do with the eggs??  I decided not to put them back in the tank, I kept them in the specimen container.  It was super cool watching them grow and change!

It was a really small first spawn… It looked like 19 eggs that were not eaten by the snails, that started to hatch.  They’re all good hiders now, and they’re not huge yet, but I can always see 7 at a time if I look good, but I’m pretty sure I got 2 albinos and I can only find one at a time…  So there really could be more.  They like to hide around the sponge filter…

So water change Thursday… and by Thursday night… Flurry of activity around the coconut shell!!!  HOW EGGSITING!!!  I can’t help but look!  There’s a lot more eggs this time!  So that’s pretty cool!

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…