Breeding Journal, Species: Pseudocheilinus hexataenia (sixline wrasse)

General
Species: Pseudocheilinus hexataenia
Social Structure: Haremic (Large male with several females, I keep as a pair)
Size of Individuals: M-3", F-2"
Age of Individuals: Unknown, my care for 8-9 months
Date added to Tank: March or so

Broodstock Tank Details
Size of Tank: 55 gal. drum
Substrate Details: A little sand
Filtration Details: Connected to 1,400 gal. system with skimmers, algae tank, DSB tank
Water Changes: ~100 gals. every 2 weeks 
Water Temperature: 78-82
Lighting: Barely, just a FW hood over the 3.5' deep tank.
Lighting Cycle: 14 hours
Other Tank Inhabitants: They used to have a couple chromis and a peppermint shrimp. Now none (shrimp lives in overflow) 

Broodstock Feeding Details
Food Types: Seafood mash, + everything else I can find
Feeding Schedule: 4-5x/day

Spawning Details
Date of First Spawn: 5-24-09
Spawn Time of Day: 8pm
Dates of Consecutive Spawns: pretty much every day
CourtShip Details: Here's a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry9pB600cEE&feature=player_embedded
Egg Size: ~750 microns, have gotten a little bigger with broodstock maturation   
Egg Color: clear
Egg Count: Varies from ~50-150

Hatch Details
Hatch Date:  June 1, 2009 or so
Hatch Time of Day: ~24 hours after spawn
# Days after Spawn: ~1
Larve Description: Well, they aren't larvae yet. They are prolarvae. ~2mm long, clear, no eyes, no working mouth, large yolk sac


ProLarval Tank Details
Temperature: Room
Size of Larval Tank: A petri dish, I've also tried yogurt containers (large) and now a quart canning jar
Substrate Details: Glass
Other Tank Decor: None
Filtration Details: None
Lighting: Room
Lighting Cycle: Room
Water Changes: I've started doing tiny, tiny WCs with a pipette.  

Larval Feeding Details
Food Types: I'm trying to slowly introduce a flagellate to their culture to see if they will take it.
Feeding Schedule:

Metamorphosis/Settlement
Date of Settlement Start:
Days after Hatch:
Date of Settlement End:
Description of Fry:

Grow-Out Tank Details
Temperature:
Size of Grow-Out Tank:
Substrate Details:
Other Tank Decor:
Filtration Details:
Lighting:
Lighting Cycle:
Water Changes:
Size at Transfer:
Age at Transfer

Grow-Out Feeding Details
Food Types:
Feeding Schedule:

Additional Information
Miscellaneous Information:




You will be required to provide photographic evidence in this thread of each event submitted for the MBI Program.
If your thread does not contain these photos the MBI Committee will not be able to approve your reports.

This is another one that I will be filling in slowly. My efforts with these are ongoing. I'm slowly teaching myself the things I need to learn to have a chance with them.

Wrasses are pelagic spawners, so the broodstock tank is designed to make it easy to collect eggs.

Broodstock tank:


Water is pumped into the bottom of the barrel and slowly makes its way up to the overflow:



The green bucket is an external overflow. 



Inside there's enough room for an egg collector.



Egg collector:

Egg at 40x (I think):



Egg at 100x:



Embryo from a later batch of eggs, 15 hours post-collection:





And a prolarva (they are around 2mm):

Prolarva video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKm8R7f3R8o

Another prolarva, attached to a huge yolk sac with oil droplet:

Composite prolarva, with backlighting:



And without:

Sixline wrasse embryonic development series.

And I love this photo. I pulled out the camera and handheld this photo, eggs floating in a yogurt container, flash below eggs and diffused through side of container.

And, what the plankton predators see (or not) when trying to eat one of the little guys:

And this last one catches us up:

Goal for soon: I have a flagellate that contaminates my rots to very high numbers (1000s per mL). I want to do another egg collection and see whether the flagellate might make a first food. Ya never know....

Checked the sixlines for for spawning again tonight: 9:18 pm. Here's one of the eggs, 30 minutes old.

 

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Differences in developmental rates in sixline wrasse embryos. All of these are 19.5 hours old. All photographs are taken in situ in a one quart canning jar.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Differences in developmental rates are still evident in the sixline wrasse prolarvae. All of these are now 43.5 hours post-spawn. The fish have tolerated very minor water changes (just with a pipette, so slllooooowwww) and the addition of small amounts of the flagellate+greenwater that I want to try as first food. 

 

Oil globule and yolk are to the left of this larva. 


Oil globule and yolk are below the larva in this shot.
 

 

Focus is a little lower in this shot so you can see fin development. 
 

A question: We're now at about 49 hours post-spawn and some of the prolarvae have adopted a tail-high stance in the water column before swimming off. None of them are doing it all the time. What does it mean? Has the oil globule been absorbed?

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

At least one of them is still holding on for me close to 86 hours post-spawn, which is a new record for me. I did a small water change and added more possible prey. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get any photos.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

I mis-added the hours earlier. My little guy is up over 120 hours now! And I think I saw it strike at _something._ Still no photos, sorry. But we've blown by my past success!

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

That's Awesome!

http://www.fishtalpropagations.com/#!home/mainPage
"Making captive breeding easier."

Looks like I finally lost him, but now I have a new benchmark. Water changes seem like a really good idea, for one.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Well, it's been a while, but I made another collection of sixline eggs tonight (138).



Look like the one on the left here has made the first cleavage.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Great stuff!  Good luck

Damn. Three pages back. Shame on me. Photo of the night:



I've finally come up with a possible first food for these buggers and I'm finally starting feeding trials. I have a cyclopoid copepod (Apocyclops, maybe) that breeds readily to densities far greater than possible with A. tonsa and really, really quickly. I have them in what sure seem to be sustainable cultures using Oxyrrhis marina (a heterotrophic dinoflagellate) as food for the copepods. O. marina are also really easy to culture (I do them in open top jars like my rots) using algae paste as a food for the flagellate. So, here's a copepod in culture that's being grown with _no_ live phytoplankton. Cool stuff. Now we just have to see if the fishies will eat them, but Apocyclops have been used successfully to rear fish and crustaceans, so I'm hopeful.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Hmm, looks like zero hatch rate on the eggs despite a good number of them developing as above. Maybe the O. marina went after the eggs (I've seen them attached to detritus like dead rots and such). I think I need a hatching vessel inside the larval tank.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

I'll need to know more about that copepod at some point LOL

Sure, man.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

They don't breed as fast as rots, but they are still awfully darn fast. I started out with them on June 22. It was a dense culture, but still only about a quart, yeah? I'm up to about ten gallons of them now and dense, dense cultures. It seems like their development rate from hatch to adulthood is really, really quick so cultures get a good exponential curve going really fast. The video is of my food trial container and I started it with just a quick swipe of a 54 micron mesh sieve through the 5 gal. culture. It's about a gallon and they have filled it up.

Andy Rhyne says that the genus has been used for fish aquaculture and I found a paper on using them for crustaceans. Fingers crossed.

Now I just need some larvae to hatch. I'm back to bacterial problems despite the peroxide bath. The copepod and O. marina water is probably loaded with bacteria. So, I'm trying a hatching container (a small deli container turned into a downweller with a 1 micron mesh bottom) in the feeding chamber. So, same water but the mesh should keep some of the baddies out. If they hatch then I can turn the larvae loose. 117 eggs today.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Do you have any info on the difference between males and females, coloration-wise? I read that they are protogynous hermaphrodites...
 
Is there a distinct difference between M and F as far as color, or just size?

http://www.fishtalpropagations.com/#!home/mainPage
"Making captive breeding easier."

I have seen no obvious differences on these two (who are still alive and spawning) other than size, with the female being much smaller than the male. The female also gets enormous when she's hydrating eggs, but that's not a normal thing.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Good to know. I was looking in Thresher's book for the info. I need to try a pelagic species.

http://www.fishtalpropagations.com/#!home/mainPage
"Making captive breeding easier."

Bringing this back from the depths of  2010!  
 
Andy, when you paired these guys up - was it random or were they picked up as a pair?  Broodstock seems like they would be easy to find (as well as not to expensive!).  Thanks so much - I've really enjoyed going over your reports and pics!

I put them together with a little help from the wholesaler. I had the LFS guy ask for the largest and smallest 6lines they had. It worked really well. I did start out with one large and two small but one of the small ones kept ending up in the overflow. I figured that was a sign to get it out of there.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Oh, and thanks.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

One last question (lol I know I'll ask more  Were they spawning right before lights out or right after?  I'm trying to get my timing down for turning pumps off so I can collect in order!
 
Thanks much Andy!

They were (and are, I think) spawning about an hour before lights-out.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Thanks Andy - funny seems like it always ends up with the quick release then they get away from each other as fast as possible! Guess that makes sense, probably the most vulnerable time for the fish.  Thanks again, looks like my female is getting chubby, I'll have to watch for it tomorrow!
 
Cheers!