More and more and more gudgeons!

Yes, I know, another aquatic tale in this blog post...but it turns out that we're very good at making excellent breeding conditions for our purple spotted gudgeons! As you may recall, we caught a few of these fish in our local creek last year and they've been quite happy in our tank since then.



So happy, in fact, that Eli and I woke one morning to find the side of the tank covered in tiny gudgeon eggs and being guarded diligently but one of the males in the tank. I'd never reared fish successfully before and with Eli's urging, we decided to keep a close on these eggs and do all that we could to ensure that some of them made it through to adulthood. A bit of reading later we learnt that the male defends the eggs for between 3-9 days and gently fans them with his fins to make sure that they don't get covered with sediment. No risk of that happening in our tank, but the male kept up his parental duties, day and night.


A few days later we noticed that the eggs were looking even more fishy...with the eyes and shape of the young gudgeons becoming apparent. We decided then to remove all of the fish, Dad included, and our red-claw crayfish, into the other tank, which had only just been made available courtesy of the new turtle pond out in the backyard, to ensure that none of the small fish were going to be gobbled up when they hatched. And then, a couple of days after that, we started seeing the small gudgeons at the bottom of the tank (there is a tiny one, right in the middle of this figure), essentially learning to swim and fend for themselves. Since then we've added food and there are six baby purple spotted gudgeons swimming around in our tank and getting bigger as each day passes by.

After all of that excitement, it then came as a big surprise (but maybe it shouldn't have!) when we spotted a male guarding eggs again in the new fish tank...and we're now into our fourth round of breeding and we are fast running out of space and capacity to rear more gudgeons!