I was hoping to do a spawning thread this year, but the amount of work I put into my 30 or so keepers was so time consuming that posting online was not gonna happen.
Towards the end of May my fish finally spawned. I had been asking on the site how I could get my fish to spawn earlier, as the previous two years the spawn happened in the second half of June giving me little time to grow the fish in upstate NY. This year I heated the water to almost 80 and after doing water changes every other day for a week, the fish finally spawned. I believe the females who participated were a doitsu ochiba, goshiki and a hi utsuri.
They hatched within 3 days. A few days after that I went through and selected both white and dark babies to be put in separate 110g tubs. I put 200-300 fry in each tub. In a larger 400-500 gallon pond, I left a mix of the yellow/white/black fry. The ratio of the colors was about 80% yellow, 15% white and 5% dark. I had heard the yellow ones would most likely become orange or yellow, which is what I found to be the case. If I was to do this again, I would probably discard all the yellow.
My tubs/fry pond:
The fry colors:
My dark fry:
I feed them with baby brine shrimp for about a week before I started to mix in old tropical fish flake and within 2 weeks, they were solely on flake.
To be continued.....