Home

Bedotia sp. “White-Fin” Eric Bodrock

Their overall body color is gray with an odd iridescent green cast thru out, accented with random black “specks” of various size and shapes.  Fins are clear with black highlights and trimmed in white.  My breeder males have grown from one and a half inches to two and a half inches in the six months that I’ve had them.  The females have grown from one and a half inches to two and a quarter inches in the same time period.  The males, in addition to being larger in size, also have larger and longer dorsal and anal fins.

My breeding group of five fish, two males and three females, were set up alone in a bare twenty gallon aquarium for spawning.  A sponge filter, along with regular water changes of fifty percent every ten days kept the water clean.  The pH stayed between 7.2 – 7.4, temperature in the upper seventy degrees Fahrenheit range and a TDS meter reading of 239.  Both a floating yarn mop and a sunken mop were added for them to deposit eggs into.  Diet consisted of live black worms, live baby brine shrimp, frozen bloodworms and assorted flake foods.

Within a month of setting them up, I started to find clear, 1.5 mm diameter eggs in the spawning mops.  Once a week I remove the mops, which I would guess contain somewhere around twelve to twenty eggs each, and place them into a two gallon tank for hatching.  Within a few days of pulling the mops, tiny free-swimming fry can be seen dashing about in the hatching tank.  Euglena is added as a first food at this time, about one ounce a day.  After a week, Microworms replace the Euglena and a few days after that live newly hatched baby brine shrimp is added to their diet.  I move the fry into a larger aquarium at the time they start to accept the baby brine.  Growth of the fry seems slow for the first month, but once they reach a quarter of an inch, growth rate increases.