Cichlid spawning cone

Description

A spawning cone is a ceramic post that a cichlid pair cleans and then lays its eggs on, and a 2024 study of early development in three cichlids used cones as ordinary equipment and described them. In each of the three aquaria, the spawning pairs were prepared with five sturdy ceramic spawning cones, 25 cm tall, with a base diameter of 13 cm, and a very rough surface, which served as a hard substrate on which the fish spawned. The surface is the part worth noticing: rough, not polished, is what those authors put in the tank and what the eggs went onto. The cone also tells a keeper when to look. Spawning of the studied species, the jaguar cichlid, green terror and red discus, began with intensive cleaning of the surface of the spawning cone. The fish intensively cleaned the spawning site for 4 to 12 h, where they later deposited the eggs, and the length of the cleaning period depended on the amount of eggs laid by the female. The authors treated that behaviour as their cue, checking every 30 min once it started. The principle behind the object is older than the object. FAO's manual on the artificial propagation of warm-water finfishes describes the same idea carried by other things: some fish, such as the channel catfish, require some hiding place while spawning, 45 l milk cans or oil barrels are used as spawning receptacles in ponds, and clay, plastic, or cement-concrete pipes of larger diameter can be used to stimulate spawning in other fishes. FAO's examples are cans, barrels and pipes rather than cones, and this page does not claim otherwise. What no source here publishes is a cone size for a home tank, a number of cones per pair, or a list of species beyond the three in that study, so this page names none of those.

Sources

• pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11047631/
• fao.org — https://www.fao.org/4/AC742E/AC742E04.htm

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