NANFA-L-- An unexpected spawning :)

Mysteryman (bestfish-in-alaweb.com)
Sat, 20 May 2006 09:04:34 -0700

A couple of weeks ago I went upstate to collect some fish with some
other guys. We caught lots of stuff, and had a great time.
( by the way, no luck yet with warmouth juice. nada. zilch. )

Anyway, we caught a bunch of something I don't think we identified-in-
the time, and which I still haven't ID'ed. It looks very, very much like
a Redeye Chub, but the dorsal fin has a little red mark in it like a
Rainbow Shiner's. I even thought they might be Rainbows, but a
side-by-side comparison with the male & female Rainbows I have plainly
shows me something different. I can't find it in any of my 4 books, so
I'm stumped. I do realize that Rainbows have a lot of personal control
over their coloration, though, so I'm not ruling them out completely. I
suppose I'll have to key one out meristically to be sure, unless one of
you other guys I was with already knows what it is, having already done
that.

Anyway, whatever they are, they spawned.

I only had them in that tank because I mistook them-in-first for the
females of the species I WANTED to put in that tank, but only when
everybody colored back up again after the move could I see my error.
While it took over a week for the others to settle down and act
normally, these mystery fish were fine by day two. A bunch of them
started swelling up like toads, and I feared some sort of internal
infection was about to wipe them all out, but to my surprise they
instead started spewing eggs all over the place, which also delighted
the other fish which gobbled them up like popcorn.
The differences between the tank conditions and the native water are
very great, so I guess that's what triggered their spawn. They came from
a cool, clear, springfed pond and wound up in a tank with a higher pH of
7.8, a bit of salt, a much softer hardness of just barely medium, and a
steadily rising temp, despite my best efforts to stop it, up to 76F. It
was about 10 a.m. when they spawned, about 90 mins after the lights came
on in the tank.

I guess that's not really much to go on, but I figured I'd mention it.
No luck so far with the other species we collected.
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