Meeting Notes

November, 2008

Mike Hellweg spoke about keeping, breeding and feeding Cyprinids at the November meeting. He said that most of these fish are in the Northern Hemisphere and Africa, and none naturally occur in Australia or South America.

As these fish are mostly egg scatterers, he described the various techniques for capturing the eggs. Some eggs are adhesive or semi-adhesive; some are non-adhesive. He uses 'egg crate' with java moss stuffed around the sides to prevent the parents from getting underneath. He also had pictures of a technique for putting together small flower pots for crevice spawners. He presented a nice setup and technique for a North American species which likes to spawn over pebbles in fast flowing streams. Mike uses a cup filled with pebbles in a low volume of water. Over that, he uses a pump to simulate a fast flowing stream of water.

Since he is the author of a book in culturing live foods, he made some interesting observations. He said that blackworms in the Eastern U.S. are very safe for fish. California blackworms are harvested differently, and he recommends to avoid them. He said to get the fish into breeding condition, to just feed worms.

He showed a slide of newly hatched brine shrimp with another slide of a "first molt" shrimp. This first molt occurs after 12 hours, when the nutritional yolk sack goes away. He compared the two pictures and showed how the newly hatched shrimp don't have mouths. He said that he makes a new batch of shrimp every day. He uses a recipe of two tablespoons salt, one tablespoon Epsom salt, and 3 drops of bleach with two and a half liters of water.

For very small fish, he likes to use infusoria. After the babies get larger they can get dried foods mixed with brine shrimp.

An election was held for next year's officers.
Sherry Mitchell was elected President
Jerome Huff was elected Vice President
Larry Wilkie was elected Treasurer
Shawn Carlson was elected Corresponding Secretary
Paul Lord was elected Recording Secretary
Cristy Keister was elected Board member
Frank Cowherd was elected Board member

Next month's meeting will be a holiday party.

Recording Secretary, Mark Harnet