It’s been a few late late nights waiting for results on the Lightning X Lightning pair’s second spawn. Given that they had either spawned on Thursday, Oct 16th, or Friday, Oct. 17th, and going off of their parents 6 day hatch window, I set up their tank on the evening of Wednesday, Oct 22nd, to prepare for a possible hatch.  This made sense given that it would either fit into the 6 day window if the eggs had been spawned on the 16th. No hatch was observed. On Thursday night, Oct 23rd, I encountered a very small hatch around 3 AM, a solid hour after lights out.  But, nothing furhter happened, so the 10 or so larvae I had snagged simply sat in the snagger for the next 24 hours.  And now, Friday night, the 24th, going into Saturday AM, it’s now just shy of 4:00 AM and I just finished “putting away” around 50-100 larvae from the F1 Lightning X Lightning pairing.  I snagged them with the Vossen Larval Snagger…ultimately most totally bypassed the snagger, so I had to set up a LED crank-charge flashlight and manually attract the larvae to it. I also had to really crank up the flow rate faster than I was comfortable with, but if I hadn’t done that, I watched as most every larvae would swim back out of the trap once it realized what was happening.
I gave LxL Spawn #2 a very weak dosage of RotiGrow Omega (yes, I know this is not ideal, but I need to thaw out some new RotiGreen) and placed a half gallon’s worth of SS-strain rotifers (because I have those going now as well, thanks Mike) along with roughly 4.5 gallons of broodstock water in a BRT downstairs. Now we wait. Knowing how these fish tend to color up quickly, as long as I don’t massively screw up, we should get an idea of what’s going on very soon…eg. within 30 days.
The larvae from Lightning Maroon Spawn #42 did not do well despite what appeared to be a solid hatch on their second night.  I’m guessing no more than 6 are still viable.
Back on Wednesday, Oct 22nd, 2014, the Lightning Maroon and her mate threw down Spawn #43.  A beautiful nest.  I have a lot of photos in the camera to post, but I’m still recovering from two back-to-back laptop rebuilds, so pictures are just going to have to wait for now.