Cyprinidae: Barbus sachsi

Thursday, 12 July 2012

Barbus sachsi

I bought mine from The Reef - two males and one female. They are sexed by a green-black line on the male's lateral line. The female has green-black spots all over her. When in good condition, seldom seen in dealers' tanks in Indy, they have orang-red fins and are pretty attractive dashing around from one end of the tank to the other. When I brought them home, I put them in a 20 gallon long tank with a group of other community fish and started feeding them the typical assortment of live foods plus Aquarian flake. In less than a month, they had grown from 3/4" to 1-1/2". I noticed the female was getting fat and the male's fins were glowing orange, so they were netted out and put into a 2-1/2 gallon tank for breeding conditioning. This is when the fish are fed all the small red worms they will eat. After 2 or 3 days, the female was placed into a 10 gallon tank with a clump of java moss on one end and a clump of willow root on the other, and a sponge filte