Sea­son­al­ity in spawn­ing of Parosphromenus linkei, some thoughts

Hello all,

I picked up a group of linkei and of Betta sp. api api last May. I dili­gently set-​up a tank for each species in what I think would be rec­og­nized as nor­mal: water RO (~12ppm hard­ness), pH low­ered to around 3.5−4 using phos­phoric acid. I also setup the tank ini­tially for kil­li­fish, plant spawn­ers, using the Mid­west method of fill­ing the the tank mostly with long fiber sphag­num peat moss. and I set up some caves using some glass yogurt con­tain­ers (from the Oui! brand), but I never found the fish using them.

I quickly found fry from both species, although the Parosphromenus I only ever found the one. Any­way, after dis­trib­ut­ing the fish out I quickly lost sight of all the fish and those tanks have been essen­tially aban­doned for the past year. I still fed reg­u­larly and would occa­sion­ally see a betta here and there, but the Paros, I assumed I had lost all but a sin­gle one. Until this week­end.

I long ago stopped using RO water and fuss­ing with pH. Heck, I’ve reduced water changes to maybe once a month. My tap water is around 200+ppm and pH around 7.0. The linkei tank has 2 female kil­lies swim­ming around now. And yet, I found a linkei juve­nile in the tank. Look­ing closer, I found another about half its size and then another, half again. Looks like the prog­eny from 3 dif­fer­ent spawns given the growth rate, and all recently. It’s been a year since I found the last ones, which leads me to believe that even if you keep them in crappy water, if they’re still happy that per­haps May-​July is when they’re more than will­ing to spawn con­sid­er­ing I haven’t found any fry out­side of these times. I just checked my betta tank, whose pri­mary occu­pants have gone miss­ing, and I just found an 1″ long juve­nile api api in there, too.

Just some food for thought

EDIT: here’s a video of a cou­ple of the fry I took ear­lier today: