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I propped the terracotta pot-base with the eggs vertically up against a tank wall
and placed the air-stone close to it to provide circulation. The temperature was
set around 30 degrees.
A couple of days later, the eggs hatched and I had a number of wrigglers. Another couple of days after that, they wrigglers started free swimming. The first
real food that I gave them was infusoria that I had cultured from several different
sources. This infusoria was mainly paramecium, not ?green water‘ that some
sources describe.
Since then, I‘ve fed my young fry a diet of almost exclusively live food. However,
at this early stage when they had just begun to swim freely, one day I did an
experiment with a teeny-weeny bit of boiled egg-yolk that I mixed into an emulsion, then dropped a single drop into the tank. I observed carefully and decided
that they were ignoring the particles of food. On the other hand, I clearly observed the fry attacking the specks of swimming infusoria when I fed them that.
I also introduced a large wad of mosses when they began free swimming. This
was based on the theory that mosses contained infusoria too. From other firsthand accounts that I have read, people who feed infusoria, supply a large
amount of java moss, and feed only live foods early seem to report fewer
losses. On the other hand, people who report feeding only dead foods such as
Liquifry seem to report early fry deaths at this stage. My theory is that this is one
of the crucial stages in raising ram fry (the other being the pre-hatching stage
when eggs are susceptible to fungus).