Hi everyone

Today, I have good news to share with fellow Hualorhan (Golden Horn fish) lovers. The pair of Hualorhans in our family are now parents of some 600-plus fry. It's been a week since the eggs were laid and the fry are now free swimming in the 4-ft-long breeding tank.

To have some sense of order in my description of the whole process, I am giving an account of the breeding process day by day. As the fry are still young, I will update their progress in the tank HERE! after this article has gone to Internet press.

Two Hualorhans - a male and a female - were kept in a 4-ft-long tank, separated from each other by a clear plastic divider. They did not get a chance to be together as they were quite aggressive towards each other. One day, about a month later, the female's body around the gills area suddenly became deep chilli-red in colour. This was in addition to the bulging in the body area below the pectoral fins.

That night, the chilli-redness became extremely pronounced. There's no way you could have missed that symptom which comes before egg-laying.

DAY 1 (Sunday 28 Jul 2002)

The next afternoon, the female (about 15cm long) laid batches of eggs throughout the whole day. The egg laying tapered off in the early evening. By then, there were about 1,000 eggs whose colour is similar to that of a chicken's egg. The eggs were deposited in a 20-cm square area on the bottom of her portion of the tank. We did not feed the female that day.

We moved the female to the male's portion of the tank and let the male occupy the female's portion of the tank so that he could inseminate the eggs. He kept hovering over the eggs for the whole day, even neglecting his food dished out to him.

More .....

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