baby madness

I'm not sure how much more planning I can plan without knowing a bit more about how to use DWeaver...in short, not until I get my hands more dirty-like.
So, for lack of any better ideas, I'll throw in another scintillating fish-story from the vaults. I hope that I'll be able to extract content from this both for the "fish-diary" section and the "about the saulosi as a species" section.

Ps. Saulosi, and indeed all the rock-dwelling fish of Lake Malawi are known as mouth-brooders. This means that they breed, or spawn, in a most unusual way. When its mating time for two lucky fish of one species, they generally circle each other closely. (Prior to this they perform a lot of chasing and odd movements that happen at no other time, including an odd vibrating move by the male that looks a lot like that breakdance move simulating the effect of an electric shock.) So while closely circling, the female releases some eggs and the male quickly follows around and fertilizes them with his milt (as it is known for fish). As quickly as this happens, the female then circles back and gobbles up the fertilized eggs and holds them in her mouth where they will stay safe and sound for about two weeks.

If you think that with a mouthful of eggs the female would have a tough time eating then I would agree with you. I've read that females cannot eat during this period, and when I got my first holding female on 8/16/07 I began observing her closely. Saulosi, especially the females and subdominant males, tend to school or shoal together but the "holding" female was keeping to herself and chilling amongst some rocks, out of sight. When I fed the group, she would come out and cruise around, nipping up to grab food but not actually opening her mouth to eat. I'll admit, I was feeling bad for her. I began crushing the food up into a powder, hoping to tempt her to eat. My secret agenda was for her -- by eating -- to forsake her brood. I didn't and don't want a bunch of baby fish in the tank because I planned the population to be a certain ideal size to minimize maintenance, ie, the relatively small population in the 55 gallon tank pollutes the water very little. I can basically leave the tank be, and except for feeding, not mess with it more than once a month. But this female wouldn't eat, although she observed the feeding instinct and swam around after the food flakes with the group.

She kept mostly to her hiding place and grew a bit thin. I kept up my hopeful food-crushing. Nearing the end of the second week I actually saw her eating little tiny bits of food, and I figured the end of the brood was near, especially since females often lose their first few broods. One day in the middle of the third week I noticed that the female was no longer hiding. Only because I had been studying her so closely for weeks could I pick her out in the school and she was no longer holding. That was that.

It wasn't for another week and a half or so, a full four weeks after I found the holding female, September 17th, 2007, that I found ONE baby hiding in a small cave and darting out boldly at feeding time to eat micro-bits of flake. A few of the other fish, when done feeding, would hang nearby the cave and menace the poor little fellow. I was actually thrilled to have him in there. He was awfully cute...very small, and very yellow-orange. He was smaller than his parents were when they were delivered to my home in April...he was about 1/4 inch long. I began rooting for him.

He lasted about two weeks before vanishing, bless him. No corpse was sighted, and I suspect that he was taken in the night by one of the catfish.

Later on I read that the holding females will actually begin to eat little bits of food later in their "term." By this time, the fish have actually hatched and are swimming around in her mouth, so she basically eats only to feed them and cannot actually swallow any of the food for herself. So I think my female was eating late in her term to feed her brood. Wild stuff!