African/multipunctatus hosting/breeding

[robt18]

Hey everyone,

So today after doing a good sized water change on my african tank I noticed my male red empress (Protomelas Taeniolatus) was super colourful and showing off. He caught the attention of one of the girls in the tank and they began courting/spinning/flashing, the whole deal. They found a rock where they appeared they were going to put down some eggs, but my synodontis multipunctatus also found this spot....
I watched for a while but decided to leave as to not disturb them. An hour or so later I went back and my empress female is holding.

A question to the african and syno breeders out there, do you know what colour syno eggs are? I've never bred them before, so I'm not sure of any visible differences there would be so early on. I've seen the eggs she's holding, they're white and about the normal size of african eggs.

Any chance that my synos snuck in there and dropped some eggs while they weren't looking?

Thanks for any help.

Rob

[markw]

Rob, The issue with synodontis is that they are opportunistic and parasitic when it comes to laying eggs. They will often wait until another "host" female is spawning and they will lay their eggs in the same spawn hoping that the female will pick them up and brood them in her mouth with her young. Problem is that the eggs of the synodontis will hatch before the hosts and begin to eat at the eggs and fry while the female is holding them. Often times she will spit and care for her fry, thinking they are hers only to never realize that the synodontis fry had eaten all her own eggs and she nutured the fry to hatch. Doesn't always happen but infortunately it does. Excellent video of this on the National Geographic video of Lake Tanganyika.

[Fishnut]

I've been having some fun on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqDVzH5W_4Y&NR=1

[robt18]

I'm aware of how the synos breed, but is there any way to tell weather or not the multis got some of their eggs in there right now? I'm impatient and don't want to wait 3 weeks.... haha.

[bitterman]

If you strip the female right now and are familiar with tumbling, You could end up with fry from both. The syno fry will hatch very early in the first 3-4 days based on the reading I have done. Once they hatch they feed on the eggs and fry of the host fish.

Good luck,
   Bruce

[robt18]

Looks like the female dropped the eggs last night. She's still quite young so I'm not concerned.

One of the main things I was wondering was if the syno eggs were significantly different than the cichlid eggs. Are they bigger/smaller?  A different colour maybe? Hopefully in a few weeks I have another shot at it! Maybe sneak a peak at them laying to get a better idea.

[Al]

The multi's eggs should be beige to dark beige in color and about 1/16". Pretty much all synos are egg scaterers, including the multis but they (versus all other synos) can also be opportunistic and practice brood parasitism as mentioned by others.
How many multis do you have? are there a few males in the group to fertilize the multi eggs. You'd have several multis going over the cichlid spawning site, trying to separate the cichlids and a male or two would be following the female multi very closely and when she would drop her eggs they would get fertilized. This would be pretty frenzied action and awesome to be at the right place at the right time to observe with a cichlid host.
Good luck - please keep us posted with any further activity.
Al

[robt18]

I have 5 multis in the tank, and 3 of them were quite excited. They typically stay on top of each other when they're in frenzy mode, which they were doing here. I have a couple that I am fairly certain are female due to their girth, and look like they could be pregnant. Unfortunately I didn't get to witness anything exciting happen, but it appeared to be exactly what normal spawning behavhiour would be. The empresses began circling, flashing, the synos moved in and stuck very close to the mating site, skimming over it every couple of seconds until the cichlids chased them off. A few months back I switched out all of the fish in the tank (except for the multis) in order to find a host for them... hopefully it's worked (or soon at least)!