Quote:
Originally Posted by shrimpinator123
what is the main reason behind us not being able to captive breed most species in the hobby?
|
Fry of the most marine fish have long palegic life stages where they drift in the open ocean with plankton. This life stage can last for months for some species until they develop into juvenile form and settle into an appropriate environment.
Although marine fish regulatory breed even in home aquariums, fry cant be kept alive long enough to develop into juvi form.
There is two major reasons for this. First; equipment like pumps, skimmer, etc kill eggs and fry. Second most fish fry start life extremely small and require very specific types of planktonic food that we know very little about. To make things worse, what they eat change quite rapidly as they grow. So even in very specific setups that dont have pumps and etc, they most starve. Some people have success growing the fry up until a specific size, but after that they cant find what the fry would eat and they starve to death. Also keep in mind, fish fry are inefficient feeders, so you need to feed a lot, which also makes it hard to keep water quality sufficiently good (which fry are very sensitive to).
There are other minor issues such as problems with artificial lights, fry getting killed by micro-bubbles, cannibalism due to uneven growth rates, swim bladder problems, fry clumping at the sides of a tank, developmental anomalies, pathogens...
Even at laboratory settings with great effort and research, it took decades to captive breed yellow tang and blue tang. And even to date, mortality rates among these fish are very high and they are prone to have morphological anomalies.