“Rainbow Shiner”
I bought 10 of these fish at an auction last year. They were about the size of white cloud minnows, and had fairly bland coloration, mostly showing a dark stripe down the midline. I expected them to have a lot of growing up to do, but as soon as my fishroom warmed up a bit a couple of the fish started showing the blue and silver spangles that you can see in the photo above.
The spangles aren’t, strictly speaking, breeding colors — males turn full bright red when they’re really keyed up. Nevertheless, I set up a spawning tank, emphasizing what I know about this species: they like to spawn over rock piles (creek chub nests, in the wild) and also in areas of turbulence. That got me this setup, which I felt very smug about, with a filter outlet bubbling through a rock pile:
That did not work at all. I never saw any eggs, and also the fish immediately found a way under the grid despite all my attempts. So, take two was just a rock pile without a grid:
I saw some spawning-like behavior in this tank, removed the adults, and waited. And waited. No fry ever appeared, and I had never actually /seen/ any eggs… so then I turned to the ultimate authority, youtube videos. Youtuber Tim had an appealingly dumb solution to my problem, a pond-plant basket hung in a bucket. I ordered a plant basket that was just the right dimensions to fit in a 5.5-gallon tank and was ready for a third try:
This worked instantly — the first morning after adding a group of fish (two males two females, I think?) I had plenty of eggs.
Why a plant basket and not a grid? I’ve no idea — I thought that plant basket was going to be a big breakthrough for spawning other egg-scatterers but so far I haven’t found any other fish that will spawn in the basket (I’ve tried 3-4 different tetra species) so there must be something about the confinement or color that suits a shiner but doesn’t suit a tetra.
Anyway… the shiner eggs were big and fertile, and hatched without any additional care. The fry were large enough to eat brine shrimp as soon as they started to swim… overall these are among the easiest most straightforward cyprinids I’ve raised… once I bought a plant basket.
Now lots of the new generation are in an upstairs cool water tank.
