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Barbus schuberti or Puntius sachsi or The Gold Barb
Posted by: Guest on Tuesday, November 26, 2002 - 07:53 PM
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by Al Anderson
For years now, I have seen this pretty little golden barb with its black-green markings always active looking for food in dealers' tanks. Full grown, they reach 2-1/2 inches, a size I have never seen.
I bought mine from The Reef - two males and one female. They are sexed by a green-black line on the male's lateral line. The female has green-black spots all over her. When in good condition, seldom seen in dealers' tanks in Indy, they have orang-red fins and are pretty attractive dashing around from one end of the tank to the other. When I brought them home, I put them in a 20 gallon long tank with a group of other community fish and started feeding them the typical assortment of live foods plus Aquarian flake. In less than a month, they had grown from 3/4" to 1-1/2". I noticed the female was getting fat and the male's fins were glowing orange, so they were netted out and put into a 2-1/2 gallon tank for breeding conditioning. This is when the fish are fed all the small red worms they will eat. After 2 or 3 days, the female was placed into a 10 gallon tank with a clump of java moss on one end and a clump of willow root on the other, and a sponge filter. The temperature was 82 degrees F and the pH 6.4. The water was rainwater filtered over peat with 1 teaspoon of rock salt per gallon.
The next morning, the female was fed small red worms and then the male was added. In less than an hour, the male and the female were quivering side by side in the willow root. They seemed to pay no attention to the java moss. That night when I came home from work, they were netted out and put back in the 20 long. In the process of netting the pair, I noticed a shower of eggs falling to the bottom of the tank. The next night, there were hundreds of little slivers bouncing on the aquarium floor. It looked like they were moving with no eyes. On the second night, the fry were clinging to the glass and now I could see the eyes and that the yolk sack had depleted. On the third night, they were fed 3 drops of Liquifry, and 1 pint of green water. On the seventh night, they were fed micro-worms, and on the tenth day, newly hatched brine shrimp.
Reprinted from "Tropical Topics", publication of the Indianapolis Aquarium Society.
Note: Published at FishGeeks with express permission from the author. This article can not be copied or reprinted, either physically or electronically without the permission of the author. Copyright 2003.
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