Day One: Larval Clownfish Emerge

Last night I moved the eggs into the hatching tank, by transporting the tile that I had set up for Lara to lay on. I brought along some of the parents' water (it was a good excuse to do a water change in there), set up an airline tube to give them some oxygenation, covered up the tank to make sure it was nice and dark, and crossed my fingers.

And...I awoke this morning to find the tank full of fry. They were tiny. It looked like a swarm of mosquitoes, not fish.

Holy crap that's a lot of baby clownfish.

My first reaction, of course, was pure terror. All these tiny lives I was suddenly responsible for! It was a lot of pressure. Okay, yes, if they'd stayed in the parents' tank, they all would have died immediately, either by getting eaten or chopped up by the wavemaker. But they didn't hatch there. I moved them. And now it's my job to keep them alive. That's a little scary.

I added a ton of rotifers and lots of phytoplankton. All of the instructions I could find online said to "keep the water tinted green" with the phytoplankton, so that the rotifers can eat and reproduce in there (and the fry can eat the rotifers). I'm not quite sure how much phyto is appropriate (some sources say light green, others say fully opaque), so I'm just winging it. I erred on the side of lots of phytoplankton and lots of rotifers.

Clownfish fry in a rotifer blizzard

Individual rotifers are extremely tiny, and I honestly can't see an individual rotifer even with my glasses on (I need the microscope).

A rotifer (and some phytoplankton) under the microscope

But a lot of rotifers in darkly tinted, phytoplankton-green water? It's a blizzard of tiny snowflakes, swirling in a green sky, with a swarm of mosquitoes buzzing around. Don't green skies mean a tornado's a-comin'? You can see why I'm terrified.