Happy Sunday,

First off, if you ordered Live Fish at the end of last week, they did not ship on Saturday due to the 21 degree temperature. Monday is supposed to be in the 40s so it will work for shipping. I also always list the updated ship dates for fish at the top of our website home page. Even though we include 2 heat packs during winter shipments, the temp has to be over the freezing point for the heat packs to actually function correctly. 

Another topic that has come up this week is feeding baby angelfish newly hatched brine shrimp. If you want any success at all in raising some of your angelfish fry, you will need to feed them newly hatched brine shrimp or another live food similar in size such as rotifers. After our angelfish fry are free swimming, we feed them with a small amount of newly hatched baby brine shrimp. When I say newly hatched, I do mean within a couple hours of hatching, otherwise, they will start to grow and be too big for some of the angelfish fry to eat. I recently switched to the Aquamaster Brand of brine shrimp as the separation of egg shells and artemia is a lot better than the Brine Shrimp Direct brand we were using. The Aquamaster brand does start to hatch at about 24 hours but really takes about 36 hours to get to the 90% hatch rate. I like this as I can use the same brine shrimp hatch for 2 feedings and still have a good amount of newly hatched shrimp in the container.

Our large seahorses (Hippocampus Erectus) have bred at least 3 times since we received them. Unfortunately, they are new at this and have basically spilled all the eggs on the gravel instead of properly inserting them into the males brood pouch. Disappointing, but we know they are healthy and happy since they are actively breeding every 10 days or so. Our dwarf seahorses on the other hand are going through a population explosion. Every male in the tank is carrying or has delivered young. In March, I will start moving some out of our breeding tanks and into a sale tank which will be listed on our website.

Last, I would like to mention that we received our shipment of Altum Angelfish a few weeks ago and they have settled into a nice grow out tank. (Purchased from Jack Wattley Discus) If you have ever raised angelfish, then you know that the Altum Angelfish is very hard to come by in the hobby. As soon as I was notified that they were in stock, I purchased them as they usually sell out in hours to a couple days at most. They are also a little more challenging to raise/breed than other angelfish. They require softer water to really thrive and especially to breed. We are lucky enough to have water out of the tap at 6-6.5 pH and are able to keep the pH at 5-5.5 through the use of Almond leaves in the tank. The altums we received are young adults and have already started sparring in the tank. I will post an update on them during my next post.

Happy Fishkeeping!