Fishy Fish Food

Had a (ill-advised?) idea this morning. As part of my job I generate upwards of 500-600 zebrafish embros per week (well the fish do most of the work actually.) Usually make more than I can use in a week because these fish are incredibly fecund and just love to spawn every morning. These little guys are about the size of a (*) at day one, they about double in size in two days at room temp. I wonder if my fish would eat 'em and if they'd be healthy.

Seems a little barbaric but fish eat fish eggs all the time in the wild right?

just a thought...

Now that I've thought about it some more (and just collected ~90 embryos) I'm goanna try it. Not with these embryos though. We usually harvest into methylene blue, not sure what concentration, we just call it 1x. I will not want to follow this procedure when making fish food. Tommorrow if I get a good yield I'll harvest a few (10-20) into regular system water. I'm considering harvesting right into SW from home but I'm afraid that'll kill the little buggers pretty quick. I kinda like the idea of offering my wrasse live embryos.

I would definately not put 500 embryos per week in my tank. Zebras are so freakin though maybe if I did I'd get variants that survive and aclimate to SW.  We send zebrafish through the regular mail in parafilmed petri dishes. No styrofoam, just bubble wrap envelopes. They get banged around and such for 5 days. Even whan the embryos get squashed they still hatch and you get wierd humpback fish that will often spawn like mad. Really amazingly tough beasts.

This is the other line. interesting that both came from the same ancesteral population but 20 years of captive breeding has made them VERY different looking. The first is the Tubingen line grown at max plank in germany. the second is the AB* line grown in good ol' Orygon.  Both originate from the murky Ganges.

Edited by deedo

Carefull here Mark, once you get me talking about my zebrafish projects it may be hard to shut me up . My projects involving these little guys are my favorite things in the whole wide world to talk about but IME not everyone is as into the details as I am. Suffice to say I'm trying to make zfish with spots instead of stripes! Seems arbitrary (a certain south park episode comes to mind) and I assure you it IS arbitrary but cool because of the details.

I thought yolk was mostly albumin, a perfectly digestible, stable protein?

ah, right, got it switched around there.