After just observing these beautiful fish for the last 18 months I decided it was time to set them up for spawning. I picked these guys up from Pete Mang on AquaBid back in 2009 as just some un-identified Danios that came along with the Hikari Danios being auctioned.
For quite some time, I thought they were the stripped version of Danio kyathit, but after looking through Pete Cottle’s “Danios & Devarios” book I thought they might be Danio sp. Red Fin. Using a photo of one of my breeders, Pete thought they could be Red Fin.
However after looking at photos of the F1 fry it was determined that they are indeed Danio sp. kyathit. It’s exciting times when there are so many new Danios that it’s hard to keep them strait!
These are really beautiful fish and I must thank Glenn Axt for allowing me to use his photo above. In the right light the rich blue velvet color is high-lighted by the red on the fins. The males seem to have the best color, but the females are very close behind.
My fish are wild caught and as such very timid. When it came time to try to spawn them, rather than move them to a breeder basket or other dedicated set-up, I simply conditioned them well with live foods and started doing gravel vacuuming every other day. The substrate in their tank is a medium sized black gravel and allowed the eggs to fall beyond reach of the adults.
It was only couple of weeks before my waterchage bucket contained about 40 newly hatched fry. After a few days on green water and micro worms the fry started eating baby brine shrimp. At around a month old the fry were 3/8″ to 1/2″ in length and sported a pale yellow stripe down their sides.
Here are some photos of my F1 fry at around 16 weeks of age…
