A beginners guide to breeding Tetra in the aquarium

Breeding tetras

Most fish keeper will at one time or another want to dabble in breeding aquarium fish, most people start of with the easiest such as guppies or any of the livebearers and after having had success with these want to move onto something more difficult and usually try their hand with mouth brooding African cichlids and then maybe moving onto substrate spawning cichlids but if you want a real challenge I would suggest you try your hand at breeding one of the tetras.
There is a lot more involved in breeding these little guys than just putting adult fish into water and retrieving the fry when they are free swimming. Having bred many species of tetras I would like to pass on some of the thing that I have found to work for me and hopefully make it a little easier for you.

Firstly buy younger fish and separate the males from the females I usually purchase six males and ten or twelve females, I use 50 liter tanks to house my future breeding stock, water conditions vary from species to species for the actual breeding but for growing and conditioning breeding stock I find water with a ph of 6.5 and hardness of no more than 70ppm at a temperature of 26 decrease is fine, use live foods such as black worm, mosquito wrigglers and newly hatched brine shrimp, I also feed frozen blood worm and on occasions a good quality flake food.

Before you start you need to get an infusoria culture going, infusoria is a microscopic creature and a perfect first food for the tiny tetra fry, starting the culture is simply done, I use a 20 liter plastic bucket that has a lid, you can use a much smaller container if you are only breeding a small number of fry. Half fill your container with water from an aquarium ideally use the water when you do a gravel clean, throw in one over ripe lettuce leaves for every 4 liters of water and put the lid on, after about a week the water in the bucket will be teeming with infusoria but be warned when you take the lid of it’s not a nice smell, to keep the culture alive I feed it one teaspoon of powdered milk per 4 liters weekly, there is no need to aerate the water but it needs to be kept warm.

Preparing the breeding tank is very important tetras are egg scatterers, and notorious egg eaters so we need to take precautions to prevent this, using your child’s glass marbles to cover the bottom of the tank this will allow the eggs to fall down in-between them stopping the adults from getting to them, I have made up breeding grids from cutter guard with a 3 mm mesh this covers the entire bottom of the tank and held up about 10 mm from the bottom, eggs and newly hatched tetra fry are light sensitive so cover three sides of the breeding tank to cut down the amount of light entering the tank, next slowly adjust the water in the tanks with your breeding stock to a ph of 5.8 and a hardness of 30 to 40ppm and raise the temperature to 28 decrease. Lower the ph by using a commercially available ph down. Softening water can be done by using rainwater, RO water or filtering water through peat moss if you use the peat moss method take into account that this will also lower the ph.

Siphon water from you breeding stock tanks into your breeding tank to a depth of about 8” there is no need for any filtration in the breeding tank during the breeding process, put in a generous amount of java moss this gives the breeders something to spawn in and it also harbours microscopic creatures in its leaves which the newly hatched fry will feed on. Put some of the females into the breeding tank depending on the size of your tank as to how many you put in, my breeding tanks are 14” x 12” x 10” and I use 2 females, allow the females to familiarize them selves with the tank I usually give them about 2 hours before adding the same amount of males.
Cover the top of the tank with piece of polystyrene foam this will stop the fish jumping out and cut down the amount of light entering the tank, tetras spawn at first light so before turning on lights use a flashlight to check the tank for eggs if there is no sign of eggs cover the remaining side of the tank with some sort of material that will allow some light into the tank if possible check the tank every 3 or 4 hours for a spawn if there has been no spawn on the first day I uncover the front of the tank to allow the morning light into the tank the next morning I give my breeders 3 days if they don’t spawn I remove them and start again with a different group of fish, once the fish have spawned remove the breeders and cover the tank completely, eggs hatch after about 36 hours so keep the tank in darkness for 2 days use your flashlight to check if the fry have hatched you should see what looks like tiny splitters of glass attached to the inside of the tank keep the tank covered for the next 5 to 7 days.

36 to 48 hours after the fry hatch start adding some of the water from your infusoria culture into the breeding tank to start feeding the fry I use about ¼ of a cup twice daily after feeding infusoria for about 5 days a small amount of newly hatched brine shrimp should be introduced and once the fry are eating shrimp which will be evident by their big and orange bellies you can stop feeding infusoria and now is the time a small sponge filter was put into the tank.
Tetra fry need clean water I usually siphon any uneaten food with a very small siphon hose every second day removing about 10% of the water and topping up with fresh prepared water at about 3 weeks the fry are moved into a larger tank and I supplement the brine shrimp feedings with a very finely crushed up flake food but only very small amounts progressively cutting down on the amount of shrimp and increasing the amount of flakes.