Losing Clownfish larvae After first 8 hours after hatch

Andy, Kathy, We keep our BRT's on a separate recirculating system of their own. Even once i pull a batch of fish to go to growout, we leave the water circulating in the BRT so as to keep water volume added to the system. I only shut it down on the evening i'm going to pull a pot and place in it. In the past i did as i described above. And then recently i started trying to sterilize the brood stock water once it was siphoned into the BRT, then made sure it was fully decholorinated w/ Chlor-Am X and heavy aeration.
 
For me at least i have had worse production than when i wasn't sterilizing. I am going to try on the next batch to just clean the brt, spihon it clean and use just the water from the larval system. No taking water from the Brood stock system. We shall see how it works. Still seems strange though that all of this seems to only be affecting the Darwins and not the orange ocellaris.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

I know there was a question a little while back about how much rotigreen to add to the larval water.  When I first move the eggs over to the larval tank I move 5g of broodstock water over.  After the hatch I will sieve the rotifers (sorry I'm not to technical on the qty of rotifers, depends on hatch size and rotifer culture density but I wing it pretty good.)  I got a plastic dropper and add 1.5ml of rotigreen omega to the rotifers and larva for the greenwater.  This amount gets added twice a day.  Usually on the morning of day three I start to drip in 1g of new salt water twice a day that drips in over a few hours.  Once the tank has reached close to the 10g range of water I up the rotigreen to 2ml twice a day.

So to report back. Here is where i stand. Hatched another batch of Ocellaris "darwin" 2 days ago. Larvae looked great when i greened the water and added rotifers. By evening they were dead. I was so ready to just throw in the towel. Sooo...what do we do when we hit a brick wall? We try and move forward. So i contacted MP (nice to have him on speed dial...lol) And had an hour long conversation about some of the issues i've been having. The consensus for us was it was most likely Vibrio, or a strong bacterial infection going on. Probably due to several fators.
 
1. use of NHBBS on a few hatches in the beginning.
2. Starting to add larval system water too early. Not leaving the system isolated long enough.
3. Creating poor water quality issues on the larval system by keeping babies in larval tubs too long until moving to grow out. I was averaging 30-40 days. Matt recommends getting them out at one week post Meta. Approx. 20 days.
4. Never having torn down or cleaned the system since it was started in August last year, and basically overloading the system with juveniles and the feeding of them. It was probably very polluted water. Seeing as how it is a central filtration system and on two BRT's and approx. 32 gallons. It should probably be broken down and restarted every few months to keep the system "clean".
 
So where do we go from here.
I'm currently sanitizing the whole system w/ bleach. Tomorrow it will get torn down, scrubbed, left to dry out and then new saltwater added w/ a little broodstock water to get the cycle going again. on 2/29/12 i have another nest to pull of "darwin" ocellaris. I am going to use larval tank water only and no filling with broodstock tank water as i have normally done in the past.   If i am still having problems it was recommended to sterilize the eggs before hatching. We shall see how it goes.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

Good to hear you're making progress.

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

Sorry for the delay in getting back it has been a crazy week.  Mixing in new saltwater with the brood stock water seemed to help.  The next morning I had around 75 or so still alive.  And now about 12 days in I have about 50 through metamorphosis.  The onyx laid eggs again and they should hatch early next week.  I plan to try and hatch them in 100% fresh saltwater (24 hours old and heated to temp) and see if I see a better improvement in the over night casualties.  Here is a video 2 hours after hatch to see how much rotigreen I added.  I ended up after taking the video adding a couple of more drops to make it just a touch darker.
 
http://youtu.be/pncHD80thfY

Looks great! Glad you are having success!

Glad to see you're seeing success.
I know I'm a little late to the thread but, I've had my greatest success by using NO broodstock water at all.
I hatch the eggs in aged clean saltwater (1.020).  My thoughts were that having this lower salinity will help
with the oxygen availablity in the very warm water (82 F) that I like to raise the larvae.  I haven't gathered eggs
in about a year but when I was, I was getting good survival rates and one of my batches of Percs ended up
with over 500 fish post meta.
 

Ok, so now i'm banging my head against the wall. 3 batches and still no change. Everytime they hatch they all dies within hours the following day. PH 8.2, Temp 81 deg. F , SG 1.021, plenty of rotifers and 4 ml of Roti green omega added to color up the water. And same amount of Chlor Am X. So i'm wondering about the chlor am x. If it is being prepared too strong could that be the reason for the deaths? What is the amount of scoops needed for 2 ltr. of water? Which is the amount i generally make up at a time. Really banging my head against the wall now. Raised 7 batches of ocellaris and darwins and now i can't get a single fish to live more than a few hours after hatching out. Really starting to think it is the Chlor Am X. Wondering if i'm over dosing the tank somehow.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

From what Gresham says, you can OD with ClorAmX but it's really hard to do it. I mix 16 teaspoons per liter of water and that works pretty well for me at a 1:1 ratio with the phyto in the copepod and larval tanks and 2:1 with phyto in the O. marina buckets. Gresham does say that's not the preferred mix any longer but I don't know what is, and that mix has always worked for me.
 
Did you cycle the system after the bleaching? What are you feeding the parents (did we talk about that yet)?
 
Can you put anything else in the water in that system and have it live? For example, copepods for a few days or so. Something delicate that could show us if there's a contaminant in that water.

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

Rotifers in GW seem to be just fine. Food is not an issue. Amphipods die in a short time though. Usually get a couple of them as hitchhikers on the pot when i transfer. Yes i've bleached, yes i've used new SW that is aged and i get a great hatch out. Really starting to think that my over zealousness w/ the mixing of the chlor Am X solution and dosing amount may be the issue. It is really the only one variable that i have changed. I had healthy, strong swimming larvae yesterday morning. And after greening up the water (just enough that i can't see the heater) , adding rotifers, and Chlor Am X i have dead larvae by 11 AM. I wish there was a more precise measurement for mixing up and dosing the Chlor AM X.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

Hi Mike,
I think the 8.2 is a high pH for a larval tank. At that pH, ammonia is a lot more toxic than at 7.8 or lower.  If you lowered your pH, (lime juice or vinegar works great, drop wise), you would not need chloramX at all, as long as your water is dechlorinated.
 
One thing you could try is to get the pH to 7.5, and skip the chloramX entirely.

I _really_ wonder what is causing the amphipods to die or if you are just seeing molts.
 
You could also try delaying adding the greenwater. (I didn't really use it for my clowns, but they were in a brt and eating copepods and never seemed to need it.) Add everything else except the greenwater and leave it for a day to see what happens.
 
Basically, the idea is to change one variable at a time where you can in order to see what has any effect.

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

Just a thought but have you tried allowing allowing a batch to hatch and not add anything for a day or two. That would rule out your additives. Going back to my very first batch I didn't use a greenwater method. I removed and added a small amount of rotifers every few hours or as often as I could. Once I started using RG+ for greenwater, my experience was also that I didn't have to address ammonia until about day 3. I vacuumed the bottom daily and just dripped in new saltwater.

Thnx for the advise guys. Got a Darwin nest coming up soon. The thing thats confusing me is we had such success right out the gate last summer and fall. And now i seem to have hit a brick wall. I will try to not do the GW for at 24 hours and see how it goes. Kathy, the PH is what the fresh aged SW mix comes too. I understand the though of lowering the PH, but to me 8.2 or there abouts is "normal" for SW. And it was my understanding that was why we used the Chlor AM X was to neutralize the ammonia. I will report what i find. I thought the GW was necessary though to keep the larvae feeding in the water column and off the BRT walls. And to keep the rotifers enriched.  

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

You will need to adjust the lighting. I used a cover with a small hole in it to provide dim lighting. You will want to add small quantities of rots and just do it more frequently. I would scoop them from my culture, rinse with some saltwater and dump them in. I adde whenever the density visually looked low. I imagine they were eating some empties but I didn't notice any ill effects. This way would probably not work for difficult species but I think clowns have enough from for error that it works out ok.

Do you have ammonia straight away? If not, and I doubt that you do, why are you adding ChloramX to the tank? Particularly if you are not sure of the amount to add to be effective? 
 
Normal seawater is 35ppt salinity and pH in the 8s, but we don't have to be strict in that for raising larvae, and in my opinion and that of others, it is better if we adjust it somewhat. May I suggest that larvae don't need normal conditions, and may be better off with conditions that would definately not be suitable for a reef tank.  
 
Saltwater fish seem to be fine at lower salinities, and even perhaps better. It is easier for them to regulate their own water content and excretion.  There is also a good reason to lower the pH: to decrease the toxicity of ammonia.  Here I am suggesting that it would be better to make ammonia less toxic this way, than it would be to add chloramX prophylactically.  There are some, Joyce Wilkerson, for one, who don't think that chloramX or any ammonia neutralizing chemical should be added to a larval tank (though I do not hold to her hypothesis completely). ChloramX may not be necessary, given good pH control and sufficient siphoning of detritus and conduction of water changes.  Your suggestion, that you are unsure if the ChloramX may be a problem, is what is driving my suggestion to avoid it, and lower the pH.
 
 I do hope you will reconsider lowering pH.  Mostly I hope that you find an answer, not necessarily mine, that solves the problem, and brings you success.

The PH in that small volume of water will naturally tend to go down. I am of the theory that i do not tinker with PH unless i have to. The reason i use Chlor Am X was that everything i read said that was the standard. Use at a 1:1 ratio with your GW additions. Also it was my understanding that with the dosing of rotifers and them establishing themselves that they cause an exponential increase in the ammonia and that we added Chlor Am X to help combat that effect. My plan at this point is to not add any ammonia detoxifier on the  next batch and see where we are from there. I will monitor ammonia and PH carefully. Also the BRT's are on a central filtration system , so after the first 24 hrs after hatch i usually start a slow drip off the system until the BRT finally fills all the way up and becomes a recirculating system. Usually takes until day 6 or 7 before it gets to the stand pipe.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

Yes, but we _know_ that something is going wrong in your system somewhere. Don't be too quick to dismiss what Kathy is saying. She's raised an awful lot of very pretty clownfish. And it gives you a place to start in order to check theories.
 
Question: Is this larval rearing container the same as was used with the fish you've successfully reared? Or is it just the system that is the same with this container being used for just the larvae that had problems?

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

"Amphipods die in a short time though"
 
Kind of a dead horse issue, but are you sure you BRT's aren't leaching stuff into the water? 
 
I've bleached buckets out for a week, rinsed, filled them, hatched occies and had them die within 48 hours.  Left BRT's in a pool for days on end and the same thing has happened.  It wasn't until I used acid to clean them and then fill with regular water for two weeks did the issue stop.
 

Arc may also have a good idea here. My local friend tried to raise clownfish in new plastic barrels, and they all died.  He could raise them in glass aquariums thru metamorphosis, then transfer them to the barrels and finish raising them just fine.  Probably something in the barrel was toxic to the tiny larvae, and that didn't matter to the larger juveniles.
 

Thanks for the vote of support Andy, but it's OK with me if Mike doesn't want to try it my way.  There are a million ways, and my way might not work for him.  But I do appreciate your regard for my work.
 

An update from my end.  I hatch an onyx hatch on the 10th.  The hatch was a nice size around 200. This time I used 100% fresh saltwater to hatch the eggs.  I used about 6 gallons of water in a 10 gallon tank.  All the eggs hatched within 2 hours after I turned the lights off.  I removed the tile from the tank, added rotifiers and added a light does of rotigreen omega to the water.  The next thing I did was I blocked of the light to half of the tank.  On the dark side I put the heater and the airstone.  Most of the larvae were swimming on the light side and starting eating immediately.  I also used a slightly lower temperature of 78-79 degrees.  When I checked on them in the morning almost the entire batch was alive.  I am guessing I lost maybe 10-20 of them. 
 
As of this morning I have lost a few more but had 100+ that seem to be doing pretty well.  I topped the tank of with some freshwater and went to work.   So far on the last three batches I have used new saltwater and that seems to be helping.  The other things I think are helping is using a 10 gallon tank with larger amounts of water, using lower amounts of rotigreen omega, keeping the rotifiers a little less dense and keeping part of the tank darker.  I will update again in a couple of days with the results through meta. 
 
The next batches I plan to use the same method and see if I continue to see improvement.
 
Thanks for all the responses.  All the information is very useful.

Thnx for all the support and info guys. I raised multiple batches in these BRT's with little problems. They are black tuff stuff feed buckets from tractor supply. It could be a problem with them. I will keep that as something to look into. I have been getting pretty dense amounts of rotifers in the BRT's in  short amount of time. I'm still inclined to think that it was the Chlor Am X. Overdosing it. It does ok with the rotifers and the strength i'm using, but then again they are producing a lot of ammonia. We shall see Wednesday. I believe i am pulling the nest tomorrow night. Try again. I will keep better tabs on the ammonia level in the brt than i have in the past. At what level SHOULD i start adding Chlor Am X?

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

It was nice meeting you yesterday. I wish I'd seen you before you left... Chad has a bottle of RGComplete he had to give away. I went looking for you but you were gone.

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

Wilkerson lists up to 3ppm at pH of 8.3 and up to 25 at a pH of 7.5 or less. Looking at a seachem badge the alert color is WAY less than 3ppm. I was never even close to 3ppm with normal maintenance and using RG + for my greenwater.

It was nice to meet you too.  Too bad I missed you I have been wanting to try that product out. 
Thanks for all the information you gave me, I got a few more things to keep an eye out for. 
 
As of this morning I still have 100+ from the last batch that are doing pretty well.  I can see a few that look like they may not make it but overall things are progressing pretty well.

Thnx for the info waldend. Sounds like we never get close to it being an issue, especially with mine being on a central filtration system. Well it's going to be awhile before i can try anything else. The Darwin's which SHOULD have been pulled tonight decided it's be better to hatch on day 8 this time instead of day 9 or 10 as in the past. So that nest was lost to the brroodstock system. It'll be another 10 days or so before i have something else to try with as i have no nests currently laid.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

Very good thread, I just found it.  Just to add something I don't think anyone else mentioned.  I have had PMD issues a lot.  A solution that worked for me often was adding new carbon to my broodstock tanks.

Good idea, Scott.  As the weather warms up in the Northern hemisphere, we'll all be getting our spawns hatching sooner, unless you keep your broodstock temp in the mid 80s year round. (I don't recommend that…)

Just to update my last batch has hit 14 days old and I still have around 100 that have made it so far.  That batch I used fresh saltwater from hatching to now.  I just had another hatch today.  I am using the exact same method this time and I will let you know how I do.
 
Thanks for all the information

Congratulations!  Nice to hear you are now having success.  Keep up the good work!  Please do follow up with us on the new batch, too.

The new batch is now two days post hatch.  I had a smaller hatch due to me pulling the eggs a little early and some of the eggs had fungused.  Even with that I had about 100 fry that hatched and so far I have lost maybe 25 or so.  I think most of these loses was do to the different times of day the fry were hatching since I pulled them early.  I had to leave the tile in the tank much longer than what I usually do. As of now the larvae are looking pretty good and eating well.
 
 

I'm glad things are looking up for you!

 
Just an FYI, when comparing the SeaChem Ammonia Alert with an API and a Salifert Ammonia test kit I found the test kits usually read 5-10x what the Alert read.  I use the Alert as an alert, if it shows any color I take steps to detoxify the ammonia.  This works well for me.

So a little update. Several batches hatched, no immediate deaths like before. So i'm sure it was toxicity from the Chlor Am X. Now the issue i am having is reliable egg hatches. I'm not getting much of a hatch on the nights they should be hatching. I remove the pot and put back with the parents then pull again that night before lights go out. Unfortunately the ones that hatch (which is the majority of the larvae) on the 2nd night never seem to make it past 2 or 3 days. I've been trying the delaying of adding the green water until later on the 1st day. Although i have been feeding rotifers in the morning as soon as lights come on. And keeping the BRT partially shaded to reduce light into the brt. I seem to still end up with a poor survival rate to meta. Thoughts?
 
On a side , but related note, I am going to be starting a line of vlog and information you tube videos as part of our business. If some of you are up to it in the future i'd love to do some one on one skype video interviews to post. Talking about breeding subjects and opinions on current subjects affecting the industry.  I believe that this is the next wave of communication that extends beyond just typing in forums. Let us know your opinions.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

Finally had a decent hatch out of orange ocellaris. About 70% of nest was still swimming when the lights went out last night. We'll see how day two goes.

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

OK guys. Tried something different and so far seems to have worked. FINALLY a great hatch out of B+W ocellaris and they are ALL still alive at the end of day one. AS soon as i get to feeling better these posts will move to our new You Tube Vlog/info videos at www.youtube.com/thecoralshoppe

Mike Meadows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thecoralshoppe
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCoralShoppe?feature=mhee
 

Congrats

Any update on the cause and solution to this problem?  I am now dealing with it and would like some ideas/suggestions.  thanks.

For me it was using freshly made saltwater for the larvae.  I believe there is too much bacteria in my broodstock tank from vodka dosing which was killing the larvae overnight.  I now use brand new saltwater at the same salinity and temp as my broodstock tank with every batch.  I setup the larvae tank the night before hatch.  Let it run until the eggs are ready to hatch then either transfer the eggs and hatch them or larvae collect them from the main tank and move them into the larvae tank.  I have consistently been getting 100-200 fish through meta with this method.  I tend to have better batches catching the larvae post hatch then hatching them myself.  I always seem to screw up the airflow on the eggs.