Moenkhausia Pittieri - Diamond Tetra By Rene Jez

 

I was given a superb trio of this type of tetra, all mature and the male was definitely he best Diamond Tetra I had ever seen.

 

Some months ago, I had tried to spawn a few acquired Diamond Tetras but the females weren't filled with eggs and then I lost the only two males I had and that was the end of that. There were some mysterious reasons in he loss of the older fish.

 

These beautiful fish originally come from Lake Valencia in Venezuela and grow to 60mm in length. They are extremely lively and eat all sorts of food offered to them. The metalic silvery grey colour is dotted with irregular mirror like spots and the male has an elongated dorsal fin. As to the water conditions, they are not demanding except for spawning, as a harder water with pH of 6.5 is preferred.

 

After the Melbourne trip and a short acclimatisation to their new environment, I placed a pair into a 450x250x250min tank. I learned a few lessons from previous trials. The fish are very shy and run wildly in a very small tank.  For this reason I used a large bunch of Java Moss as the shelter and spawning medium. Being quite suspicious about this natural plants, during a check of the cleanliness of the bunch, I discovered a lot of planaria worms. These creatures can eat a whole lot of eggs and non swimming fry in a few days.

 

The difficulty was to clean out a living plant of the worms and not kill the plant, which was solved by placing the plant in a container and the submersion of a copper plate into the container for a days. To see a positive result, I left a few snails in the same tank, until they were killed by the copper which was dissolved in water. Then the Java moss was rinsed in fresh water and freed of anything that was living or dead.

 

As mentioned before, the fish were panicking very easily. I used a towel to cover the front of the tank to prevent any disturbances.

 

On the second day they spawned, the only indication of the spawning were some fungused eggs scattered close to the Java Moss. The parents were removed, tank completely covered to keep eggs in the darkness. During an occasional check on the second day I saw a few wriggling fry. After 5 days the fry started to swim and eat.

 

Daily visits to a farm pond to collect small nauplia of cyclops solved those 10 critical days before the fry started to take microworms and grindal worms. The small fry are not fussy about their type of food. They grow reasonably quickly and after 4 weeks they were around 5mm long, at this stage I transferred them to a larger tank.  It seems amazing to me how young fish can fill their tummies nearly to bursting point without actually bursting. At this age, the young fish are looking rather a drab silvery colour.

 

There was a very low loss of fry (hardly any) and finally around 200 young fish are still swimming, with hopes of bringing them up into maturity to form a few good spawning pairs.

 

I would like to give thanks, once more, to the Melbourne hobbyists and the beautiful fish provided by Mr. Ron Bowman.