Plumbing a river

[chefkeith]

Great tank set-up. That's very natural looking and very easy on the eyes. 5 stars.

[LES..]

Thank you all for the coments, I am very pleased with the way the tank ans turned out.

The new tank is definitely a hit with the Cheni just take a look at this full on loach-on-loach spawning video! The quality is a little crappy, i was grabbing the feed remotely from the web cam and didn't have the time to work out how to get the feed encoded with more b-frames so there are a lot of odd artefacts.

The larger loach is our alpha male who seemed more than happy to try digging a spawning pit in the sand. I was not convinced that sand would be good for cheni fry after seeing them wiggling into the gravel in the old tank which is why i went for the half sand/gravel look in the tank, the idea being that i knew the cheni would spawn in gravel.
The smaller female is from the last generation bred in the old tank, we particularly liked her markings and decided to keep her, with the in-breeding this might not have been such a good idea...

Hope you enjoyed it :-)

[Mad Duff]

Loved it Les, proper Loach porn

They look to have settled in very nicely

[Graeme Robson]

Superb video Les!!

[Martin Thoene]

Excellent video Les. Is breeding these guys starting to feel like falling off a bike yet?

That male is a particularly nice fish by the way.

Martin.

[Jim Powers]

Great loach porn! It will be interesting to see if the sand spawn is successful.

[LES..]

Excellent video Les. Is breeding these guys starting to feel like falling off a bike yet?
That male is a particularly nice fish by the way.

Well we have not seen much in the way of fry recently and this is the first spawning we have seen in the new tank. The male is actually one of the first two Cheni we got and he is a lovely fish. I just wish i had a camera that could do him justice... His tubercles are very impressive, starting below the lip and going right up over the eyes. The lovely rich colouring on his dorsal fin is something special too.

Great loach porn! It will be interesting to see if the sand spawn is successful.

Given that this is all new set up with sand i'm very curious myself. Unfortunately i don't even know if there were any eggs laid as the pit is hidden from all viewable angles. I am also assuming that this is the female's first spawning as she was being held in a different tank up until Sunday. I suspect nothing will come of this encounter but she did stick around for a long time after spawning, guarding this stone from everyone including the alpha male. I have seen this with our other females after spawning, it is as if they want to protect the eggs. I have about another hour of footage of just the female on this stone going grrr at people but edited it out. Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

[Emma Turner]

X-rated Hilly footage! Excellent stuff, LES.., well captured. Fingers crossed for a good result.

Emma