- Each year more than 20 million ornamental marine fish
are collected from the wild for the aquarium industry.
There are over 2 million hobbyists
that keep marine species at home.
The global value of all this trade
exceeds 300 million U.S. dollars every year,
and that number is going up every single year.
The market is wide open for people,
commercial and hobbyist alike,
who want to breed aquarium fish themselves.
Do you have a favorite species?
Do you have some space and interest?
Well, you can probably breed that animal.
It won't be easy, and in fact, a lot of people
are gonna tell you that it is impossible,
but nothing is impossible, nothing.
You can be the first,
and all it takes is some interest
and a whole lot of dedication on your part.
I have wanted to try to breed my favorite species,
the Potter's angelfish, for a long time.
I just don't have the space for it in my house,
but one day I might and I'm looking forward to that day.
I wanted to make this video
to just go over the state of the art of breeding fish
and just to get you started,
give you the basic knowledge
that will let you search for papers
and understand some of what they're telling you.
I am not an expert on breeding fish.
There are few experts in marine fish breeding,
but that is no reason why you can't do it yourself
if you're interested.
You could provide the hobby
with a rare or seasonal fish, year-round.
You'll be providing captive-bred specimens
that would probably live longer
and be healthier and better adapted to captive life
than their wild collected counterparts ever could be.
Marine fish break down into two basic groups
and they're based on how they spawn.
Demersal spawners, they're fish
like clownfish, gobies, damselfish,
they glue their eggs onto a surface,
like a tile in your tank or a rock.
These are generally
the easier species to breed in captivity.
Their eggs tend to hatch larger
and that gives them a big headstart on life,
they can eat larger food right off the bat.
On the other side, you have pelagic spawners,
these are fish like angelfish, the Potter's angelfish,
tangs, butterflyfish.
These fish just broadcast their eggs and sperm
and then leave them to drift and mix in the water column.
Pelagic spawners are actually much more common
in the hobby, and it's a shame
that these eggs hatch into much smaller larvae
and therefore they require
much more specialized and tricky care.
In fact, even achieving
a kind of abysmally bad 5% success rate
in a pelagic species, would be huge news,
while, commonly, clownfish breeders,
they're able to get more than 75% survival rates.
The first hurdle that you're going to need to meet
is just knowing
that you have a male and female fish to start with.
Sometimes it's obvious, often it's not.
A lot of species not only look the same
for male and female,
but they can transfer to the opposite sex,
so sometimes back and forth, at will,
and that just makes the difficulty go up
to ensure that you have a pair.
Not only that, but some fish are seasonal spawners,
or need some sort of environmental trigger to spawn.
Pelagic spawners, for example,
well, they often spawn in the evening,
it gives their eggs a greater chance at not being eaten,
but some fish are only gonna spawn
if you provide some, as yet unknown, trigger for them.
There's a lot to learn, even at this stage.
Scopas tangs, for example,
have been spawned in captivity,
but it required a manual injection of a hormone
to get them to do so,
and that's not something, I think you or I
are willing to do for our fish at home.
Most fish eggs float on the surface of the water,
so collecting them is as easy
as putting a net in an overflow,
or simply scooping them from the water surface
as they collect there.
The newly hatched larvae after that, are extremely fragile
and require specialized food.
In fact, you'll need to be confident in your ability
to culture the food itself,
as your newborn fish will need a constant supply.
Raising these live foods
is basically as hard as breeding the fish
in the first place,
so be sure to practice this before you attempt
to do the whole thing altogether.
Some fish, like clownfish and other
very commonly bred fish,
hatch large enough to eat rotifers directly.
You can get rotifers in a few different species,
from large to medium to small and super small,
and they're actually different species.
These range in size from about 70 microns
up to about 350 microns.
You can buy these species, online, pretty easily
to set up a home culture.
You can get them from places
like Reed Mariculture or Sustainable Nutrition,
places like that.
Other fish, particularly pelagic spawners,
like the Potter's angelfish, require smaller foods.
Tiny species of copepods are often used,
Parvocalanus species in particular.
These are available commercially as well
and you can start a culture just the same way
you would with rotifers, and, for example,
ReefPods sells the Parvocalanus, copepods.
Keep in mind that your live food itself requires food,
so you're not gonna get away with only a rotifer culture,
you need what's called green water to feed the rotifers.
Green water is exactly what it sounds like,
water with algae in it, not too difficult.
This water could also be used
just to feed your filter feeders in your tank,
and you can also use rotifers
and things like that for your filter feeders as well,
and they'll certainly appreciate it.
You have a lot of options for making green water,
you can buy cultures of Isochrysis galbana
and other strains like that online,
along with all the things you'll need to culture it,
really just a container, a light,
and some nutrient solution, i.e., fertilizer.
So you'll need to culture your algae
to make the green water,
and then use the green water
to culture your live food, be it rotifers, copepods,
even brine shrimp, and then you feed all of that
to your newly hatched fish larvae in a constant fashion.
Success in fish breeding is measured in days,
so keep detailed logs about what you're doing,
what you're feeding, how the tank looks,
how the larvae look, as they progress day-to-day.
That way, when something goes wrong,
and something will go wrong,
you can change your plan for the next round,
'cause you'll know what you did and what didn't work.
Share what works with the hobby,
we breed so few of these fish
that the more we know about what they eat
and at what stage, the better.
As your larvae get older,
they'll start to require larger and larger foods,
mind you, these are still tiny foods.
You might start off with newborn copepods
and then move to rotifers, which are a little bit bigger,
and then to brine shrimp,
which are even a little bit bigger.
When you finally make the move,
it just depends on your larvae and how they're growing.
The whole process from hatching to settlement
where the larvae turn into proper juvenile fish,
takes about 30 to 40 days for most species.
Once you're into the juvenile fish phase,
the hard part is basically over,
they're still super fragile
and able to have horrible things go wrong,
but the hardest part is really feeding those larvae.
I'll put a paper down below in the description
to a overview of the current state
of the art of captive fish breeding
and I'll link to all the resources for buying algae
and live foods and things like that,
everything I have, I'll put it all down below,
then I hope we help you out get starting.
I do hope you enjoyed the video.
I really do wanna try this out myself at some point,
it's just a space issue, but that's solvable.
So have a fantastic day, stay safe,
and I will see you next time, bye.