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Festives


SpidersWeb

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Or more specifically Mesonauta festivum

Does anyone have any experience with breeding these guys?

All I could find on the internets was that spawning the Festive was difficult due to difficulties in inducing the pair to spawn.

Reason I'm asking, besides wanting more Festives, is that I have a pair that are causing a weee bit of trouble. Basically the male (~5-6inches) will bite, on the face, our adult oscars, that fish has the biggest cojones I've ever seen! But anyway, he's guarding his territory.

Closer to home the female is starring at the filter inlet, I put my finger near it (outside of the water) and she repetatively jumped out of the aquarium and bit my hand until I moved.

Protecting eggs you'd think.

But I can'ty see any.

If they're going to take over half of our 650L aquarium, there had better be eggs!!

Any ideas on how to induce a spawn? NB: papilla etc not showing.

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Thanks for the good wishes, but definately nothing there, if you distract them with food they'll ignore the filter pipe for a while.

These guys aren't too bad as long as nobody goes in their corner, with the exception of the 3rd wheel (another female festive), who must remain invisiable if she is not to be chased.

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They've had tanks to their own in the past (3ft), we put them in there because we realised they'd be too hard to breed and we needed the tanks for other fish (even our pair of gold sevs dont have their own tank :( ).

Yeah I was thinking they're wanting to spawn too, just wondering how to provoke it. They've been doing this agro thing for about two days now, and their papilla/optivistor (spelling) aren't showing yet :(

Dont have any live food here big enough, have been feeding them frozen blood worms, and they get leftover cichlid pellets etc Got baby brine shrimp but thats for my kribensis/pearl danio fry.

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My Chocolate Cichlids often before breeding, would show the signs for a few days without their tubes down, just the normal behaviours going on, then on about the 4th day or so, they would be down and they would breed, so heres hoping thats what happens with your Festives :) They might think they old enough to start a family now huh :lol: :lol:

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Hey bud, they acted the same when I had them for a while. They even went as far as cleaning a couple spots on the driftwood and killing a fancy plec that got too close. I'd chuck the pair in a 2ft tank and let them rule themselves, mate. The third wheel female should be fine in the comm tank alone.

What kind of fancy plec was it? A Blue Phantom Pleco/L128 which I had spent WAYYY too much money on. Gutted.

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:lol: you weren't to know

It's amazing how almost every internet resource i find says they're a 'placid' fish, some even said 'shy' :roll: Even the single female isn't shy or placid.

If anyone has smaller tanks (2ft and under) for sale soon let me know, looks like I'll be buying some in 3 weeks time.

btw guys I mentioned at the meeting the pearl danios, well got about 20 or so free-swimmers now. Might be more, but thats all I can see.

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