# Easy breeder (for egg-scatterers) project



## essabee (Oct 11, 2006)

I had this project in mind when I built a breeding room for my fishes two years ago. Several unfortunate events managed to shelve all my projects for the last couple of years. I am back and so is my old enthusiasm. 
The commonly kept Barb and the Tetra group of fishes are mostly egg scatterer breeders. They breed very easily in our tanks but we never get a fry because all the eggs are gobbled up by the kept fishes, including the parents. The parents make a feast of the eggs they have laid in natural conditions too, and other fishes join in the feast - but in natural conditions the breeding areas are huge and the concentration of fishes are low. The huge numbers of eggs laid and the natures way of making most of a specie spawn at the same time ensures the safety of a sizable number of eggs finding suitable hiding where they hatch and the fry can hide. The water currents and littered floors, and other debris in the water create good natural cover. The egg scatterers prefer such bottoms and weeded areas to spawn. 
In our tanks (which we keep overly clean) there are few hiding places and the fish concentrations are high so they are totally unsuitable for the breeding aquarium. To get the best result from your attempt to breed egg-scattering specie - it would be best to have a specie tank with only the fishes you have selected for breeding.
If you can gender your fishes - good. If you cannot, then select 10 fishes - 3 of the fattest and 7 of the most active. Remember in egg-scattering species the number of males chasing an egg-laying female is usually high.
So as not to be tied down to, and always be engaged diligently watching the tank for signs of egg-laying, and nervously keeping yourself prepared to remove either the eggs or the breeding-stock; we need to have a system that would automatically remove the eggs from the breeding stock and shift them into a hatching & rearing area. Our easy breeder must be able to do so without our help.

It therefore naturally follows that our easy-breeder tank must have at-least two areas. The first where we have our breeding stock and the second where the eggs will be shifted to and hatchlings would be reared. A laying area where we have the breeders and nursery which is out of bounds for the breeders. Having this two areas is the key to the easy-breeding tank. If we can build two such areas complimenting each other the our work is half-finished.

Next the forces that would shift the eggs to the nursery area from the laying area must be omnipresent at all times. This omnipresent shifter is what would release us from being enslaved by our egg-scatterer breeding project and enjoy the entire breeding process in total tension-free relaxation. It is creation of this omnipresent force that the rest of the function of the easy-breeder depends. Once you create that your easy-breeder tank is complete and all that would be left to do would be to follow a routine looking after the parent and the hatchlings.
The movement of eggs is to be by water current. What I had in mind is to have the breeding stock on both side of the fry-raising portion. The bottom of the fry-raising area is the bed of a under gravel filter. The two breeding areas are connected to the fry-raising tank at the bottom with a trough full of marbles all along the partition. The spray bars from the power off-take of the UGF takes the water from the fry-raising portion to the breeding tanks creating the needed water current from the breeding area to the fry-raising tank. The marbles filled troughs act as a trap for the eggs and filter out the parents from the fry-raising tank.

I am attaching a schematic drawing to explain my scheme:-


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