The topic could have also been "Good things happen if you do a water change" - it was when I did my bimonthly water change that I noticed one of my cats moving a bit funny, hovering in one spot up and down. I got suspicious, so I picked him up to take a closer look. Sure enough, he was sitting on a string of eggs, that he was fanning. Cool, by the looks of it the fry were ready to hatch any minute. So I left him alone so he can relax before the big day. I just had to catch a bigger fish out quickly so he wouldn't snack on any of the hatchlings.
So I looked up breeding behavior in Spatuloricaria sp. - this is what I thought I got a 3-4 years ago. Not common it says, cave spawner, hold on, my fish is not a cave spawner. Time to dig up the Welsatlas. After a bit of browsing I came across the Loricaria family, yeap, that looks more like it, it appears that I have Loricaria sp. "Rio Atabapo", nice to finally know. :)
The next day, the eggs were gone. It took me a little while, but I eventually spotted one of the little ones, then another ... I managed to catch about 25 and moved them to a smaller space so they could be feed more directly. It's been a bit more than a week now, and all of them are well, so things are looking good.
Anyway, just a little story to cheer you up. It's these kind of things that keeps the hobby interesting for me. I got the fish years ago because I found them interesting, bigger adult fish, and smaller juvenile ones since I wasn't sure about the sexes. It took until now to see some breeding action. Talk about patience ... fun stuff :)
Some pics of the little ones, about 10mm now, seemed to have almost doubled in length within a week. Enjoy.
(https://www.ovas.ca/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fovas.ca%2Fgallery%2F1560_12_11_17_9_25_03_58571041.jpeg&hash=165821b49ba37902a99f5ae284fca937280ed41f)
(https://www.ovas.ca/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fovas.ca%2Fgallery%2F1560_12_11_17_9_25_02_58561367.jpeg&hash=15ef25533243200b0aeda8f3ade7ad319c810b33)
(https://www.ovas.ca/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fovas.ca%2Fgallery%2F1560_12_11_17_9_24_59_58511206.jpeg&hash=eade08c8a00a2fefc842e004b853e30cad909892)
Pretty cool.
Nice shots.
Do you remember what your camera settings were for these pictures?
Wow! Those are awesome cats! If you are looking to offload some when they get a bit bigger I would definitely take some off your hands. I've got the perfect oddball cat tank they would go nicely in.
:) awesome congrats. I'm sure people would like to see them at a future auction :D
Cool looking little cats! Congrats on the babies.
That is awesome.
I've never seen my panda cories spawn, ive only seen the young ones after the fact.
Thanks everyone, great to see some excitement.
Will be interesting to see them grow out, seems pretty fast right now, but I'm sure it will slow down. If all goes well there's going to be more fish than I can keep, so I will have to give some away eventually.
About the pictures, use a macro lens, preferably 1:1, I even added 1.4x tele-converter to get more magnification, off camera flash from the top, and shoot away. The camera itself, keep at low iso, shutter is 1/60 since I'm shooting flash, used flash commander mode to trigger remote flash.
Very cool spawn!