- 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.
