# Egg Tumbling Complications



## Strohster (Oct 24, 2008)

I've recently begun breeding Vic Haplochromis sp. 44 Red Tails, and since I had a few females not carry their clutches to term, I decided to strip eggs and tumble them.

I think I've got the rate of bubbling down now (not too strong, but constant movement) but the last batch of eggs I put in the tumbler started out a nice healthy brown and about a quarter of them turned white within the first day. Any clues about why that might be?

I'd hate to think I was messing something up with these little beauties that is causing these eggs to die.

They're not a fuzzy white. There doesn't seem to be any fungus from the necrosed eggs but some of them definately are dead. Whatever help you could provide would be appreciated.


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## exasperatus2002 (Jul 5, 2003)

how long are you waiting to strip the females? If its too early they could have just been unfertilized eggs.


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## samaki (Oct 25, 2002)

Hi there's nothing to do apart putting some methylene blue to avoid fungus, perhaps not all the eggs have been fertilized so some of them die. the better is to remove the dead and keep those which still live.
xris


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## Strohster (Oct 24, 2008)

Thanks for the input. I thought I was waiting long enough (a few days) and when I extracted all the eggs they were brown. They didn't turn white until they had tumbled for a day or two.

I'm definately a novice at this and because I'm only yelding fry from about half to a third of the eggs, I figure I had to be doing something wrong.

I'll wait a week before stripping them from here on out and I'll be sure to have nothing in the tank except the tumblers as well to keep anything from being sucked into the tumbling tube. Right now I have all the tumblers in a ten gallon with a dozen fry... Whenever i feed the fry i notice some particles get into the tumblers as well.


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## samaki (Oct 25, 2002)

Yu should hold the eggs in a place by themselves( a 5 g tank is enough) so they can't be polluated by the foods particles yu gave to the fry.
xris


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