Regarding the futures of the fish:
I'll probably take some in to work to put in the tanks in the lab...I'd like to eventually get a pair breeding there so students can see all this (and so they can see a group of small bangaiis hanging out with our big diadema urchin!)...sort of a donation to the Bio Dept I currently have an unpaired bangaii from another source in the lab that I'd like to pair off with an unrelated fish from this batch.
Most of the rest my daughters and I will probably try to sell (I'm not too sure how much longer my wife will be comfortable seeing me dumping money into these new marine tanks without them supporting themselves a bit!...my freshwater tanks are not near so expensive to set up or operate!). I'll try to remember you guys who are interested in some when they get bigger.
I hope the parents will continue spawning. My daughter wants to take some in from a future spawning (that will more honestly represent our own breeding efforts) to one of the Minnesota Aquarium Society's monthly Breeders Award Program auctions.
Regarding food:
Last night I had no brine shrimp hatched to feed them and I tried giving them some freeze-dried cyclopeze I had here. Some of them snapped at small bits (within a half hour of emerging from their father's mouth), but many did not. This evening now I have a batch of shrimp hatched and they are quite excited by these shrimp.
As brand new baby fish go, these are *really huge*, and
baby brine are no problem for them. The only other baby fish that I have seen that compared in terms of size and development were the young of mouthbrooding cichlids.
However, much more so than the cichlids, these bangai babies are amazingly well-developed replicas of their parents, but with proportionately longer fins. I've never seen anything like this before. There appear to be about 29 or 30 of them...I'm not sure how they all fit into their father's mouth.
I know this is all old-hat for all the experienced bangaii breeders out there, but I must say these little fish are mesmerizing, especially clustered together in such quiantity.
Now, the next goal for my daughters and me is to raise up some baby clownfish (which is why we set up these marine tanks at home in the first place). I think for starters we are going to give a prepared food a try that some breeders have been using as a substitute for the rotifers that are normally used as a first food. We'll see how that goes, since I'm not sure I have the time to be fooling around with rotifer culture at the moment.
First though, our recently aquired pair of cinnamon clowns need to start spawning again in their new tank (and our big female maroon and new tiny male maroon have yet to be introduced to each other).
