The Wonder of Nature

I had a great weekend this week. Even though I went through a spell of worrying all turned out well. My mother has cancer and was in the hospital. She had a reaction to new chemotherapy. That is cleared up now. She'll go home as soon as her blood count is back up. But enough of that for now. From late Wednesday evening to Thursday afternoon two pairs of my angelfish spawned. So on Saturday morning I saw that the eggs of one pair hatched. I waited nearly all day Saturday for the other clutch of eggs to hatch, but they didn't do so until Sunday morning. Now I am waiting for a third pair to spawn. Right now they can't seem to make up their minds on where to lay their eggs. For the new babies I will have to wait until they are swimming by themselves. At this time they are in a stage called "wiggler." That's all they do right now. Just wiggle. I cannot feed them yet because they are feeding on their yolk sacs. When their yolk sacs are used up they will be able to swim by themselves. Then it's time to feed them after I transferred them to A 2 1/2 gallon tank. I had the eggs hatch in half gallon wide mouth Mason jars with air stones bubbling in them to keep the water turbulent. They need turbulence because stagnancy will only cause them to die.

The parents are already in their separate tanks. They laid their eggs on two by ten inch slates. I take the slates out and place them in the waiting jars. A drop of a solution called acriflavin to keep the eggs from getting fungus. It turns the water into a greenish yellow color. Some angelfish breeders use a solution called methylene blue, but I have always preferred acriflavin. Methylene blue just turns the water blue and just doesn't do any good for me. Even if I used a whole lot. All I have to is put in one drop of the acriflavin and that does the trick!

I will not bore you any further with the technicalities, dear readers. Therefore I will end this blog with a fond good night and see you all soon.

Miss Stanford"s Friend