Drum roll...... FANFARE!!!!!
While I never intended achieving "success" with this species to be an example of "it only takes one" -- well, here we are.
My oldest fry from the January 8th hatch is at 60 Days Post Settlement today! It has been living together with a sibling from another hatch, at first in the same 2 gallon fishbowl, and for the last couple of weeks, in the same larger growout kreisel. The two are quite gregarious -- they hang out very near each other almost all the time. The Bluestripe fry are much less "friendly" that way.
The larger fry is about 4.25 cm or so now, and the smaller one is just slightly behind in size, being just shy of 4 cm. They continue to thrive in the copepod soup I have them in, with a constant supply of Tigriopus, Nitokra and Apocyclops, plus additions of Acartia and Arctodiaptomus, plus some Moina salina from time to time, too.
Here are some pictures taken this morning. The first one was taken in the kreisel, with my Secchi stick in the background to serve as a metric ruler. The water in the kreisel is a bit murky from the live phyto in it, though, so I scooped the 60DPS juvenile out with a 600ml beaker to get a better picture without having to shoot through so much greenish water for the second picture.
Meanwhile, after missing the hatch on the night of March 15th, the next batch of eggs was a very weak one, and there was basically nothing left to hatch on the night of the 24th. The pair in Tank #1 continues to spawn every 9 days, but they also tend to alternate between large, healthy spawns, and small, weak spawns. The spawn on March 25th was a nice, large, healthy spawn, so I'm looking forward to a decent hatch next Tuesday, April 2nd.