INTRO TO BANGGAIS
by Michelle Tsai
Most hobbyists have difficulty keeping wild-caught Banggai Cardinalfish alive due to stress, parasites, etc. In fact, the majority of the wild-caught Banggais do not live for more than a month in home aquariums. For this
reason, 50,000 ~118,000 Banggais are collected from the wild monthly! Dr. Alejandro A. Vagelli, the leader of Banggai conservation, has traveled multiple times to Indonesia to study them in the wild. Along with Dr.
Frank Marini in Houston, he tried to list Banggais on CITES, but was unfortunately rejected in summer 2007. We thank them for all their efforts. For more information, go to the credit section for related articles.
Although breeding Banggais can be difficult in terms of obtaining a breeding pair and getting them to spawn, the babies, however, are extremely hardy and easy to raise. In this article, I will explain my method of breeding Banggai Cardinalfish and hopefully interest you to help conserve the shrinking population of Banggais in the wild by breeding them at home.
GETTING STARTED
Materials:
- Nursery tank or a Breeding net
- Air pump w/ tubing
- A tubing valve to adjust the bubbles
- Small 25W heater
- Thermometer
- Baby brine shrimp
- brine shrimp net
- Selcon
Note: if using a breeding net, you won’t need an air pump or heater or thermometer
MATING
The hardest thing about breeding Banggais is actually obtaining a pair and getting them to breed. First of all, male and female Banggais appear almost exactly the same, despite all the attempts to try to identify the differences in dorsal fins and mouth size, so it is very difficult to tell them apart. Furthermore, although Banggais school in the wild, they are aggressive toward each other in most home aquariums due to limited space. Therefore, the only way to keep two of them is to have a male and a female.
Male carrying eggs above, female below. Note the jaw difference
So, how do you get a pair?
Most hobbyists buy three Banggais at a time. When mature, two of them may pair up and you’ll have to remove the third one from the tank before it gets killed. Once you obtain a male and a female, they may pair up almost instantly, but not guaranteed. However, to get them to breed, they’ll need a good environment. By that, I mean a large enough tank, at least 15 gallons, but larger the better. If the tank is too small, the male may end up swallowing the eggs or produce very small batches. With good water quality and a ton of feeding of nutritional foods high in protein, they should be ready to breed.
They begin with a mating dance, and then the female will lay eggs while the male puts them in his mouth. This process is extremely fast so most people don’t get to see it.
Video of Banggais doing the Mating Dance by Coral Dynamics. You can see the male banggai bulging his jaw while doing the mating dance, and the female swimming behind him.
After transferring the eggs, the male Banggai’s jaw bulges and stops eating. He will open and close his mouth constantly to get some water circulation in his mouth. If you notice all these, then congratulations,
your Banggai is pregnant!
When a young pair breeds, the male Banggai may not be able to hold all the eggs, and you’ll see some eggs left on the female.
CAPTURING FRY
The male Banggai holds the eggs in his mouth without eating for 18~25 days. Towards the end, you will start seeing the babies poking their heads out of his mouth. This is about time to try to get them out. If you let the male release the babies in the tank, most of them will get eaten up, yes, the starving daddy will chase after them for a good meal too!
The best way I found is late night or early morning, when it’s pitch black. Turn on the lights, and the Banggais will be temporarily blinded. You might need to move some rocks, and then get a net to scoop up the male Banggai, he should release all the babies. If you do this when the daddy is awake, you might end up scaring him to release the babies in the tank instead, so be careful not to scare him.
If he is one of those stubborn fish and won’t release the babies after you caught him, you might need to hold him in your hands and pry open his mouth to dump out the babies. Or you can hold him by the tail and swing him a little bit, he’ll release the babies too.
Otherwise, you’ll have to just wait for him to release the babies and try to scoop them up one by one.
Premature eggs, about 8~10 days old
Some advanced breeders such as Dr. Frank Marini retrieve the eggs prematurely and hatch them in an artificial incubator like the one in the video below. The benefit of doing this is to prevent the daddy from starving and hope to increase reproduction by helping him incubate the eggs.
Generally, each batch of banggais can range from as little as 1 or 2 to over 50 babies! The bigger the male, the bigger the clutch.
This is a batch of about 50 babies.
TANK SETUP
Banggai babies are very hardy, and therefore it is not necessary to have a separate nursery setup for them. You can just put a net or a breeding net in your main tank. The breeding net can be various sizes. If you have a large batch of 50+ or if you have multiple batches, you can make the breeding net out of PVC pipes and mesh. The only trouble with these nets is that you’ll have to wash them every so often since slime would build up on the walls.
The little dots are the babies. They lived happily in the net until they outgrew it.
The babies are the dots on the left side of the tank near the algae.
FEEDING
First Stage:
At birth, the babies will eat pretty much anything that’s small and moving. The easiest food source is brine nauplii (newly hatched brine shrimp). However, brine nauplii is only nutritious for the first 24 hours, after that, they loose their yolk sack and becomes pretty much worthless. So you’ll either need to hatch new brine shrimp daily or ror brine nauplii older than 24 hours, use Selcon to enrich it for nutrition. Just soakthe older brine nauplii in Selcon a few hours before feeding. For the best growth, feed the babies multiple times a day. You can even set up a drip system to drip brine nauplii into the nursery so that they constantly have food. A constant food source contributes to faster growth.
A Banggai baby with his belly full of brine shrimp.
Second Stage:
After about a month, you can start adding frozen Cyclop-eeze to their diet. Banggais are notoriously picky eaters. Sometimes you may need to starve them a little to get them eating non-live foods. As you increase the amount of Cyclop-eeze, you can decrease the amount of brine nauplii.
Third Stage:
At about two months old, you’ll probably notice that the tiny foods aren’t enough to fill up the bigger Banggais. At this time, you can switch to smaller mysis shrimp. Brine shrimp aren’t nutritious enough to produce healthy fish. If at this point the Banggais have not switch to frozen foods, then you’ll need to buy live adult brine shrimp and enrich them with Selcon to feed the Banggais, but it’s best that they eat frozen mysis shrimp as early as possible.
A trick I found to switch the Banggais to frozen foods is to associate them to the pipette as food, and also feed at a regular schedule. So for example, every day, at noon, they know the pipette will come into the tank to release brine nauplii. After they get used to this schedule, I would skip one or two meals, and return at noon the next day. At this point they’re so hungry, they just swallow whatever that comes out of the pipette. Do this a few times and they will eventually convert.
IMPORTANT FACTORS
These are some important things to keep in mind when breeding Banggais:
Environment
In order for a pair of Banggais to breed, they need to be happy, which means a good size tank (minimum 15 gallons but the larger the better) without fish that would bother them, and a good hiding spot. Adult Banggais are known to hang around corals such as anemones for protection. They also like caves. Feeding good quality foods also contributes to spawning. However, keep in mind that you will need to be able to
get to the male Banggai when it comes time to capture him for the babies, so trying to do this in a full size reef tank would be a pain.
Resting
No, it doesn’t mean you. The male Banggai needs his rest after carrying eggs for over three weeks without anything to eat! The female will be ready to spawn while the male is carrying eggs and also after he releases his batch. Being a nice guy, the male Banggai would most likely take on another batch on an empty stomach. However, in this case, he will probably end up swallowing or spitting out this batch, or if he does keep it, you would only get a few babies. The prolonged effects of not allowing the male to rest between batches may result in an early death. This is the reason some breeders have multiple males to one female and just transfer the female to a different male after spawning. Otherwise, after scooping up the male for the babies, I recommend keeping him in a separate tank to fatten him up for at least two weeks before returning him back to the female.
Food
Constant nutritional food source helps the babies to grow faster, which means it’s better to switch them to frozen as early as possible since frozen mysis shrmip is much more nutritious than live brine shrimp. It is also cheaper and readily available. Feed multiple times a day with nutritious foods.
CREDITS
I learned a ton about Banggais and breeding them thanks to these people:
Dr. Alejandro A. Vagelli
- The Reproductive Biology and Early Ontogeny of the Mouthbrooding Banggai Cardinalfish, Pterapogon
- Kauderni (Perciformes, Apogonidae)
- Significant Increase in Survival of Captive-bred Juvenile Banggai Cardinalfish Pterapogon kauderni
- with an Essential Fatty Acid-Enriched Diet
- First Comprehensive Ecological Survey of the Banggai Cardinalfish, Pterapogon Kauderni
- Reproductive Ecology of Pterapogon kauderni, an Endemic Apogonid from Indonesia with Direct Development
Dr. Frank Marini
- http://www.breedersregistry.org/Articles/v4_i4_marini/marini.htm
- http://www.reefs.org/library/article/f_marini.html
Steve Hopkins, Harry Ako, Clyde Tamaru
- http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/seagrant/communication/pdf/Banggai%20Cardinalfish-Final.pdf
Keith Clarke
- http://www.reefs.org/library/talklog/k_clarke_102499.html
Coral Dynamics Inc.
