Waterlogged

At about 2 1/2 months, I suppose can quit calling them fry. I haven't done an exact count, but I think the net population gain was around 12 from the hundred or so wigglers. I seemed to lose about one or two a day for each of the sixty days. There are five nicely sized bronze cories dwelling in a new 3 gallon tank, and about six or seven smaller ones left in the 10gallon temporary tank I set up. I suppose I'll get around to shutting down the nursery in the next few days. One advantage of using a reasonably large nursery is being able to use a built in brine shrimp hatchery:

The attrition of the cory fry has been slow but sure. I've lost at least one a day for the last few weeks, culminating yesterday in the first mass death-- about fourteen of them in one day. No major changes to anything except the regular water change-- it might have been the temperature shift (around five degrees, gradually) that did it.

The current population is still at least fifty, and some of them are really beginning to look like fish. A couple of the corpses couldn't be sucked up in a turkey baster, so that makes the death seem more "real" somehow.

A shaft of light went across the 2.5g tank when I transfered the first cory fry a couple of days ago. There are 19-20 now-- every time I count I get a different number. Krista insisted that I take a snap. I liked this one because you can really see the whiskers.

The weird thing about these guys is that I seem to lose a single fry each day but the total seems to remain the same. The latest estimate is around 100 total.

The little buggers are difficult to photograph.

The first spawn (now 10 days old) are around 1/4" long and are starting to pick up some color. Krista has remarked that they seem to grow a new body part every day. The current count is about 20.

The new hatchlings are doing fine at around 3-4 days old, and are scarcely half that size. I counted about 35 on the second day, but they've gone into their "hiding" phase where they spend most of their time buried in the filter/debris on the bottom of the tank. They aren't moving around much, but neither did the first batch at this stage.

If all these guys survive, I'm going to have a lot of fish to deal with.

The cories started to hatch from the second batch spawning today. Just a couple so far, but if it's anything like the last batch there will be a lot more. The first batch may be up to 16-17 by now, they seem to be appearing from nowhere. They still don't resemble cories yet, although they already behave like them.

There was a second round of spawning yesterday. The collected result was around 30 or 40 eggs. I was able to watch it this time, instead of dashing off to class. The entire process didn't look like much fun at all.

The first batch of fry turned out to be a bit larger than we guessed. There are at least twelve of the little wigglers. They seem to be doing great so far.

This is a single cory fry in the corner of the nursery tank. It has seven or eight siblings, so far as we can tell.