Surprise Dragonface Pipefish fry!

I got a shipment of 4 Dragonface pipefish from Blue Zoo today.  One of the males' bag contained dozens of fry!  I wasn't expecting them.  I put them in a fishbowl with gentle air, copepods (including copious sieved N1 A. panamensis = 70 microns wide), and rotifers.  I don't see them eating anything, just swimming a lot and burning a lot of energy.
 
Does anybody have any experience with first foods with these guys?  Please help ASAP -- they won't last long!
 

Congrats on the stroke of good fortune. Hopefully you manage to pull a couple through.

Chad Penney - MBI Council
Agis quod Adis

Very cool! Good luck.

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

Congratulations, Jim! Is there any way that you could sacrifice one of the larvae to get some scope pictures? Maybe measure the width of the mouth? That would be a big help in trying to figure out a first food for them. I know Christian said that they would be really easy to rear during the BC discussions, but I've never completely believed that. They seem to have much smaller eggs than some of the other pipefishes.
 
If the copepods are too big, though, I think the only option is to try to find some ciliates or something. Maybe even a dense O. marina culture (Karen said that whatever ciliate she used with the angelfish was about the same size as those). 
 
I still haven't seen eggs on mine, though their body shape has changed as they've matured. I still have hope. But if the eggs are that small, maybe I've just missed them.
 
 

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

I have plenty -- probably 100 or more, so yes, one or two can be sacrificed to the microscopy gods.  I'll see what I can accomplish with the scopes at work today.

Cool. I'm looking forward to seeing what you find out.

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

OK, what I found out is that the wide-open gape of the mouth is around 300 microns, based on the measurement of the open mouth shown in the first picture, which was taken with the dissecting microscope zoomed all the way in, and compared with a stage micrometer photographed at the same zoom.  With the compound microscope, though, I was able to get an idea of the size of the inner diameter of the snout.  It appears to be about 110 microns at the narrowest spot, as shown in the second picture.  The third picture is just a full body shot taken with the dissecting scope (sorry about all the detritus).
 
What I don't know is if the limiting factor is the gape, or the smaller diameter of the snout.  I know that in theory, food will be pulverized on its way into the snout during the snick, but the degree to which this hold true with fry this small is unknown to me.  It might be that they will limit themselves to food small enough to go down easily.
 

 

 

 
 

Attached Image(s)

Excellent pics.

Wow. Nice pics as always, Jim. Boy, and that belly still looks empty, too. My gut says that the 109 is probably the maximum for hard-bodied prey unless there's some stretch in there, which I doubt. Those spines on the apocyclops nauplii sure might be keeping the pipes from eating them. It looks to me like you will need something smaller or squishier. (Which is a word. I swear.) I sure would fill up the water with the O. marina and any ciliates you can find. Do you have any small strain rots? They are likely too large, but they look squishy to me. I wonder if they could get past the constriction?
 
I love these copepods, BTW, but we really could use one that's about 20-30 microns smaller, too. Sorry. I wish I had better things to tell you.

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

Congrats and excellent pics

Update:  Mildly encouraging news.  I saw some snicking!
 
Here's the scoop:  The primary container they are in is a 1/2 gallon fishbowl with numerous A. panamensis of various sizes, with an emphasis on smaller nauplii, plus some rotifers, which, of course, are taking over.  This container also got some T-Iso with a healthy contamination of O. marina, and as many of these ciliates contaminating my Euterpina cultures as I could get (I think they are Euplotes).  I also took some of the fry and put them into three other containers:  One with a very dense culture of A. panamensis of all sizes plus T-Iso, Another with a decent culture of Euterpina acutifrons, and Another with the results of sieving my A. panamensis culture through an 80 micron sieve (to feed my H. reidi fry the larger copepods)p, leaving mostly just the smallest nauplii.
 
The ones in the Euterpina culture died, likely because of water quality issues with that culture.  The others are still alive.  Watching them tonight, I definitely saw one individual in the sieved A. panamensis culture snick several times!  I could tell each time he/she was going to snick, because the fry would first hover still in the water, the head would then bend down, the very end of the tail would quiver excitedly, and then, *snick*.  I watched this happen several times with this one individual.  The light and my strong 4x Dean Edell readers helped me see that he was snicking the A. panamensis nauplii, at this point probably NII or NIII, but I don't really know.
 
I put several more from the "main" vessel into both the sieved nauplii container and also the dense Apocyclpos vessel.
 
I have to say it really is nerve wracking, having these very special fry, and not really knowing what to do with them!

WOOHOO! Glad to hear their snicking at something. I'm sure they couldn't be in better hands Jim. Keep us posted!

It sounds like you are doing the right thing, though. Good job!

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

Thanks for the encouragement, guys, but I don't hold out much hope.
 
Only a couple of fry still alive in the sieved A. panamensis nauplii culture.  I did still see some occasional snicking this evening, but these guys are really dropping like flies!  At least we learned a couple of facts this time:
 
1)  Mouth and snout size.
2)  They do snick at smaller A. panamensis nauplii.
 
Not much, but every little bit helps!
 

Don't sell yourself short, Jim. Those are already big steps forward. I hope these few keep going for you.

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

I did see three of them still alive, and at least one, still snicking in the sieved copepod culture this morning.  I added more freshly sieved culture that would have lots of N1 and maybe N2 nauplii.  By this evening, all of them had died.
 
I looked at the very last one that had been alive under the microscope, and could see nothing in its gut.
 
I don't know what they were snicking, but I'm guessing it may have been food that was just too large, even if it was the smaller nauplii.

Sorry to hear that Jim. Hopefully these guys will give you more fry soon. What do you plan on trying for food next time around?

Sorry, Jim. Any thoughts on what went wrong or what to try differently next time?
 

 
If they were eating something soft-bodied you wouldn't necessarily see it in there, from what I hear (I think it was Karen--KMB--who told me that). Is there anything else in your water that they might be hitting, even if it's just a few? Do you still have that large ciliate contaminant in your cultures?

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

Great pics and information.

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

Well, frankly, I'm just too inexperienced at anything besides seahorse fry to have a genuine clue!
 
That said, my casual observations are:
 
The air seemed to really bother them.  They did best in the containers with the least air.  When I saw the most snicking, it was actually in a 1 gallon fishbowl with probably only 1 liter of sieved copepods, and no air at all.  Perhaps they just need wide, shallow containers, and very little or no air.
 
There were some ciliates (I think they are euplotes) in the culture where I saw snicking.  I know for a fact though, that I saw snicking of something bigger than the euplotes are, so I assume they were copepod nauplii.
 
What I would do differently is to have a good culture of a species of copepod with smaller nauplii.  I would very much like to get good at culturing Parvocalanus.  Karen Britten sent me some from Hawaii, but the didn't last long.  They were doing OK, but then a power outage made them go without air for several hours, and they never really recovered.  According to Andy Rhyne, Parvocalanus are very difficult to culture, and need to be cultured in sterile conditions almost like phyto.  He has a protocol for culturing them, and says that he will release it eventually on MOFIB, but he also says that he isn't optimistic about the odds of the average hobbyist being able to culture them successfully.
 
Apocyclops (especially together with O. marina) are a potentially powerful tool for fish breeders, but they are not a panacea.  We need to find smaller foods of sufficient quality, and establish protocols for culturing them.  That is what I see as the next big step in live foods.
 
Oh, and thanks, Tal, for the compliments!
 

Unfortunately, a still container will eventually scum over such that there will be no gas exchange and everything will suffocate. But it sounds like they might do best in a kreisel setup where all the flow is from water.
 
Or, what about a divided culture with fry in one side and air bubblers on the other, separated by mesh the fry can't get through? Then you could really pump the air into the screened side, which would cause some water movement on the other while still protecting the fry from the air. You wouldn't get a lot of movement, but you don't want much either.
 
I certainly like the Apocyclops, but I also certainly wish N1 were about 20 microns smaller with N2 about where N1 is now. But if wishes were fishes then they'd all be captive-bred by now. I can't help but wonder if there's something soft-bodied out there that we need to find, like Karen's ciliate, that can serve as a bridge to copepods. Copepods are awfully hard and spiny and must be hard to eat when the relative size difference between predator and prey is low.

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