A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to acquire a group of 8 Danio meghalayensis from my good friend Stephan Tanner of Swiss Tropicals. As these fish are quite rare here in the states you can imagine my delight!
After several failed attempts at spawning these fish using a breeder set-up, I decided to loaded them up with live foods and started to monitor them very closely. Several weeks ago during an afternoon thunderstorm they spawned.
The tank was devoid of plants except for a few sprigs of moss and has a medium course black gravel substrate. In typical Danio fashion, spawning was a group affair. The females took turns burrowing down in the substrate and the males would follow. As they are large and boisterous fish, an egg would occasionally raise up into the water column to be quickly eaten by one of the bystanders.
When they completed, I first though about doing a gravel vacuum to remove the eggs but decided to move the adults to another tank instead. At around 60 hours, the first fry started to hatch. The tank is not heated, but the weather here has been very warm and tank temperatures are around the mid 70’s F. A couple of days later and the first fry are free swimming. More and more fry entered the water column and a week after the spawn there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 60 fry.
The fry were fed 5-50 micron sized golden pearls for the first 6 days after which they were given bbs and young daphnai moina. At less than 3 weeks old, some of the fry have developed a light yellow stripe along their sides.
==================
UPDATE 10/20/2012
==================
Here are the fry at 90 days of age…
