Butterfly Fry | First 9 Weeks

Remember that blog post from February in which I was complaining about having to cull so many of my butterfly fry so early on?  Well after that, I ended up counting them all and I still had almost 200 fry left!  Needless to say, it made me feel much better about how things were going.  We’re now at week 9 and I’m down to about 100 fry remaining.  Most of the culls in the recent round of culling were fish with deformed mouths, so I started treating them with praziquantel in case the deformed mouths are being caused by flukes (a parasite).

I’m a little bit disappointed to see that the majority of them have tails that are too fused- the tail split is very minor.  But I was informed by an experienced breeder that the tail splits increase as the fry grow, so hopefully they’ll improve in the coming weeks.  Despite that, there are a few that appear to be quite exceptional in the tail split and tail spread, so I’m still very excited to see how they turn out!  I will probably be keeping the nicest ones to continue breeding them and selling the rest.  Eyes haven’t started developing yet, and they still have their fry color (brown).  I’m very anxious to find out what they’re adult colors will be!  A small percentage of them appear to be matte because the gill covers are transparent, so the parents must have a recessive calico gene or something…  I need to check my goldfish breeding book and reread the part about scale type inheritance.