Xenophallus umbratilis not breeding

seba

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Hello everyone,

I purchased a trio of Xenophallus umbratilis last December and haven't had much success with them. They're in a 20 gal with 6 wabenmusters I'm growing out and I've only gotten 2 spawns from them, within a month of purchasing them. I had an original female jump not long after getting them and now I have a group of 4 males and 3 females. The tank has a layer of duckweed and is full of guppy grass so they have plenty of shade and cover. Doesn't seem like they're seasonal spawners either from what I can find online. I had them at 27°C for a while and dropped it to 24°C but their temp range seems to be very wide so don't think that's a problem.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
 
I have never heard of them but some general rules apply for breeding fish.
Make sure the pH, GH and KH are suitable for the species.

Make sure you do lots of big water changes and gravel clean the substrate. Big water changes can simulate rainfall and most fish breed during the wet season. If you use slightly cooler water for the water changes, it makes it more like rain.

Feed the fish 3-5 times a day with dry, frozen and live foods. Use a variety of foods and feed dry food first, then frozen, then live.

Try dropping the temperature into the high teens or low 20s (18-22C) for a few months and then raise it a couple of degrees. This combined with big water changes using cooler water can make the fish think it's winter. Then they either breed or wait till it warms up and then breed.

Treat the fish for intestinal worms and gill flukes. If they have any parasites it can reduce the likelihood of them breeding. Section 3 of the following link has information about deworming fish. A couple of deworming products (Praziquantel and Flubendazole) also kill gill flukes.
 
I hadn’t heard of them either. Beautiful fish. One for emeraldking I think.
 
xenophallus umbratilis produce fry on a regular basis tank temperature is suitable may be a possibility that new born fry are being eaten. as with all livebearers keep them well fed and feed plenty of live foods
 
I hadn’t heard of them either. Beautiful fish. One for emeraldking I think.

I do know them for I've kept them myself. Best is not to keep them at too high temperatures. They do have a wide tolerance when it comes to temperature, That's true but it's not that they are comfortable enough to breed when the temperature remains high. Room temperature is enough for them. Xenophallus umbratilis come in superfetative and normal ovoviviparous specimens. So, it will be a question whether you are dealing with superfetative or normal specimens. In general, a livebearer species is superfetative or normal ovoviviparous or vivparous. But the genus Xenophallus is one of those genera that can go two ways.
1697646060119.png

This livebearer is to be found in Lake Nicaragua (also known as Cocibolca or Granada in Nicaragua) on the Atlantic drainage to the Rio Parismina (Costa Rica) and the Rio Tenorio drainage (Costa Rica) on the Pacific slope. Most waters that they occur in are moderate flowing waters.
Despite of the fact that they're omnivores, they prefer mostly live food.

That you guys haven't heard of them is understandable. For it's not a livebearer species that will be offered through retail that much. It's a wild livebearer species. And they also reproduce better when having a diet of live food. My own experience is that they will leave their fry alone.
 
I do know them for I've kept them myself. Best is not to keep them at too high temperatures. They do have a wide tolerance when it comes to temperature, That's true but it's not that they are comfortable enough to breed when the temperature remains high. Room temperature is enough for them. Xenophallus umbratilis come in superfetative and normal ovoviviparous specimens. So, it will be a question whether you are dealing with superfetative or normal specimens. In general, a livebearer species is superfetative or normal ovoviviparous or vivparous. But the genus Xenophallus is one of those genera that can go two ways.
View attachment 329030
This livebearer is to be found in Lake Nicaragua (also known as Cocibolca or Granada in Nicaragua) on the Atlantic drainage to the Rio Parismina (Costa Rica) and the Rio Tenorio drainage (Costa Rica) on the Pacific slope. Most waters that they occur in are moderate flowing waters.
Despite of the fact that they're omnivores, they prefer mostly live food.

That you guys haven't heard of them is understandable. For it's not a livebearer species that will be offered through retail that much. It's a wild livebearer species. And they also reproduce better when having a diet of live food. My own experience is that they will leave their fry alone.
Thank you all for the help!

should the superfetative and ovoviviparous specimens be treated any differently? I think they're ovoviviparous as I remember seeing 3-4 fry appear for the second spawn but may have been that they were dropped within 2-3 days.

I've been feeding them northfin kelp wafers, north fin bug pro, earthworm and shrimp sticks, repashy (grub pie mixed with super green) and north fin veggie pellets. I don't currently have any life food colonies but tried to start a cherry shrimp colony in their tank and they slowly disappeared. If I added enough adults would that help or do they need bite sized live food?

I found that they would chase their fry a bit but they were always able to hide in the java moss and guppy grass.
 
Thank you all for the help!

should the superfetative and ovoviviparous specimens be treated any differently? I think they're ovoviviparous as I remember seeing 3-4 fry appear for the second spawn but may have been that they were dropped within 2-3 days.

I've been feeding them northfin kelp wafers, north fin bug pro, earthworm and shrimp sticks, repashy (grub pie mixed with super green) and north fin veggie pellets. I don't currently have any life food colonies but tried to start a cherry shrimp colony in their tank and they slowly disappeared. If I added enough adults would that help or do they need bite sized live food?

I found that they would chase their fry a bit but they were always able to hide in the java moss and guppy grass.
Mine never chased their fry. Any size of live food will be good for them.
Normal ovoviviparous and superfetative specimens don't have to be treated differently. You also won't be able to see from the outside which type it is. But when they're superfetative, you'll have less fry being born. For those wil always be small batches (sometimes just even one fry at a time) before the next batch of fry will be born in 1-3 days and so on. Normal ovoviviparous females will have larger batches of fry each time.
 
When I had the similar looking (but different, I know) Priapichthys nigroventralis for a few generations, I got no fry with any prepared foods. If I made freshly hatched artemia a lifelong staple, they bred. When I could mix in daphnia, they did even better. I could maintain them alive on prepared foods, but the group expanded with live.
 
When I had the similar looking (but different, I know) Priapichthys nigroventralis for a few generations, I got no fry with any prepared foods. If I made freshly hatched artemia a lifelong staple, they bred. When I could mix in daphnia, they did even better. I could maintain them alive on prepared foods, but the group expanded with live.
would grindal worms work? I'd like to get a "1 size fits all" live food which would be appreciated by all my livebearers, from these to Xiphophorus Alvarezi. I also have vinegar eels and microworm cultures available to me but don't know if they'd be eaten by the bigger livebearers. I crushed up some rams horn snails today which they loved but will get a culture of live food.
 
micro worm and vinegar eels Are more suitable for new born /baby fish. Grindal worms are suitable for Juvenile and adult fish. White worm is another good food, but very high in protein so need to be careful how much you feed to fish ,Daphnia is another good live food and not too difficult to culture
 
It should work. Vinegar eels and microworms are too small, in my experience. Brine shrimp is costly, but excellent. I see you're in Toronto so PM me if you want a Canadian source for excellent cysts.
I use grindals as a once or twice a week conditioning food for killie spawning. My only livebearer now is X milleri. But the worms are very fatty.
 
@emeraldking what is superfetative and how does it compare to ovovivi and the other one?
Superfetation is a state of multiple pregnancies at different stages. Superfetation occurs in both ovoviviparous and viviparous livebearers. A joined study of the University of Wageningen discovered that superfetation occurred in both types of livebearers. I've joined the lecture. The ones that are superfetative are less in number than the non-superfetative species. Superfetation occurs mostly in livebearers that are living in fast streaming water where livebearers swim with the current and against the current. If such a female gets pregnant, superfetation allows her to become fat by the pregnancy but not that fat to be pushed away in the water current (whether that concerns with or against the current). Because such a female won't have the full batch of a normal carrying female, she can allow herself to still have a streamlined body despite of her pregnancy. And it also makes it able to let her even stay still in flowing water if she needs to. Males of superfetative livebearers have mostly an elongated gonopodium to waste not time in a fast flowing water stream to direct their gonopodium to the females vent. And as I've already mentioned before, males with an elongated gonopodium won't need a courtship to get as close as possible to a female to try to mate. There are some exceptions and one of those exceptions are Micropoecilia species. These can be normal ovoviviparous or superfetative. Males won't have the elongated gonopodium but just a short with hooks gonopodium. But we should look at the shape of the female. if you take a fast look, such a female look somewhat similar to a guppy female. But the females of Micropoecilia species are a more slender, their nose is more pointed and their dorsal is more to the back in comparison to guppy females. This makes them more aerodynamic which they also need in fast flowing waters. If they live in fast flowing waters, they're mostly superfetative. Specimens living in more slow moving water till even still, are in general normal ovoviviparous.

As I've already mentioned, this phenomenon does occur in certain species of both ovoviviparous and viviparous livebearers. When it happens in ovoviviparous livebearers, the female develops a low number of eggs each time, they'll be fertilized by releasing sperm from the folds of the fallopian tube and one or more days after that a new batch of eggs will be developed and fertilized again and so on. In viviparous livebearers it works a bit different. This is because females of viviparous livebearers can not store sperm packets. What happens is that all the eggs are fertilized at the same time but in some way the female is capable of just let one or some more eggs go to the womb and other will follow in one or some more days after. It's not really clear how she can hold on to the further development of the fertilized eggs that haven't gone to the womb yet. Nature is a wonderful thing or shall we say secret?

I see and read on several sites on the internet that when we speak about guppies, mollies, swordtails and platies (to mention only the commercial known ones), they are labeled as being viviparous. But that's totally incorrect. They're ovoviviparous livebearers. Most households don't even know the viviparous livebearers. And to those who don't know the difference between ovoviviparous and viviparous livebearers, an explanation follows:
With ovoviviparous livebearers, the embryos have no placental attachment and will be totally nourished from the yolk sac. So, the mother does not nourish the embryos, she's just a safe place before the eggs will hatch. By the time that the mother is ready to give birth, the eggs will hatch. and the fry will pop out of the female's body.
True viviparous livebearers like e.g., goodeids in the embryonic state are being nourished by the mother through the socalled trophotaenia (or also spelled as trophotaeniae). It's in some way similar to the umbilical cord (placental viviparity) in mammals. These trophotaenia will be shed or absorbed (they'll nourish themselves through the trophotaenia) in the first till two days after birth. These trophotaenia do look like a cluster of small umbilical cords.
 
Superfetation is a state of multiple pregnancies at different stages. Superfetation occurs in both ovoviviparous and viviparous livebearers. A joined study of the University of Wageningen discovered that superfetation occurred in both types of livebearers. I've joined the lecture. The ones that are superfetative are less in number than the non-superfetative species. Superfetation occurs mostly in livebearers that are living in fast streaming water where livebearers swim with the current and against the current. If such a female gets pregnant, superfetation allows her to become fat by the pregnancy but not that fat to be pushed away in the water current (whether that concerns with or against the current). Because such a female won't have the full batch of a normal carrying female, she can allow herself to still have a streamlined body despite of her pregnancy. And it also makes it able to let her even stay still in flowing water if she needs to. Males of superfetative livebearers have mostly an elongated gonopodium to waste not time in a fast flowing water stream to direct their gonopodium to the females vent. And as I've already mentioned before, males with an elongated gonopodium won't need a courtship to get as close as possible to a female to try to mate. There are some exceptions and one of those exceptions are Micropoecilia species. These can be normal ovoviviparous or superfetative. Males won't have the elongated gonopodium but just a short with hooks gonopodium. But we should look at the shape of the female. if you take a fast look, such a female look somewhat similar to a guppy female. But the females of Micropoecilia species are a more slender, their nose is more pointed and their dorsal is more to the back in comparison to guppy females. This makes them more aerodynamic which they also need in fast flowing waters. If they live in fast flowing waters, they're mostly superfetative. Specimens living in more slow moving water till even still, are in general normal ovoviviparous.

As I've already mentioned, this phenomenon does occur in certain species of both ovoviviparous and viviparous livebearers. When it happens in ovoviviparous livebearers, the female develops a low number of eggs each time, they'll be fertilized by releasing sperm from the folds of the fallopian tube and one or more days after that a new batch of eggs will be developed and fertilized again and so on. In viviparous livebearers it works a bit different. This is because females of viviparous livebearers can not store sperm packets. What happens is that all the eggs are fertilized at the same time but in some way the female is capable of just let one or some more eggs go to the womb and other will follow in one or some more days after. It's not really clear how she can hold on to the further development of the fertilized eggs that haven't gone to the womb yet. Nature is a wonderful thing or shall we say secret?

I see and read on several sites on the internet that when we speak about guppies, mollies, swordtails and platies (to mention only the commercial known ones), they are labeled as being viviparous. But that's totally incorrect. They're ovoviviparous livebearers. Most households don't even know the viviparous livebearers. And to those who don't know the difference between ovoviviparous and viviparous livebearers, an explanation follows:
With ovoviviparous livebearers, the embryos have no placental attachment and will be totally nourished from the yolk sac. So, the mother does not nourish the embryos, she's just a safe place before the eggs will hatch. By the time that the mother is ready to give birth, the eggs will hatch. and the fry will pop out of the female's body.
True viviparous livebearers like e.g., goodeids in the embryonic state are being nourished by the mother through the socalled trophotaenia (or also spelled as trophotaeniae). It's in some way similar to the umbilical cord (placental viviparity) in mammals. These trophotaenia will be shed or absorbed (they'll nourish themselves through the trophotaenia) in the first till two days after birth. These trophotaenia do look like a cluster of small umbilical cords.
Great stuff EK.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who had to read that a few times to “get it” at least I think I ”got it”.
 

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