I’ve tried to spawn a several different Characins over the past year or so and not with much success. In my attempts to propagate a tetra I’ve tried multiple methods, any where from separating the adults before setting up a pair to spawn, using groups of adults, soft water conditions, dark tanks, large and small aquariums, you name it. The best I was ever able to do was to raise two fry from one batch to adulthood. Mind you the adults I was attempting to spawn were Milwaukee tap water raised and removed from a community tank were they had been "born."

The two cases were I managed to get fry from Tetras were both accidental. I had Lemon tetra and ember tetra both spawn in conditioning tanks prior to being set up in a "spawning" tank. Upon removing the adults and cleaning up the conditioning tank I found, in one case, one baby, and in the other, two fry. Any attempts to find fry in the spawning tanks resulted only in disappointment. This only goes to show how truly easy tetras are to spawn. It’s hard to look at a tank of happy mature tetras and not find a male courting a female or even spawning, it’s another thing to actually save the eggs from being eaten by the adults and to then raise the fry.

After all of my extremely limited successes, I looked for some help and new ideas. Eric Rogne had been submitting a lot of tetras into the BAP so I decided to seek his advice. Eric said he used a ten gallon tank filled with straight reverse osmosis water, a sponge filter, and plenty of Java Moss and other spawning materials. After letting the tank sit without fish for at least a week he stated that he added a group of conditioned tetras, making sure to have females plumb with eggs and several males that had been showing bright colors. Generally after 2-3days Eric said he would see eggs in the Java Moss if he looked close enough and that was his trigger to remove the adults. Then it was a waiting game. It would take the fry several days before they pushed their way out of the eggs and still several days more before the fry would be ready to eat very fine powered food. Eric indicated that this method would produce a number of fry.

I tried Eric’s method using some Diamond Tetra (Moenkhausia pitteri). Things went according to plan, except the number of fry. At first I only had 3 or 4 tiny silver slivers swimming near the surface and hanging around the sides of the tank, but the next day I found 10 or 12. But then disaster struck, after about a week I could only find 5 fry and then quickly only 1. I assumed the powered food wasn’t enough for the babies and that I would have to start all over. I let things sit for a few days and waited, without feeding, to see what would happen.

When I finally took a close look at things again I found several babies, much larger then I would have expected. Every time I got out the flashlight and looked for babies I would fins a few more. I managed to find a total of 6, five larger ones and one little guy. The bigger tetras were now eating baby brine shrimp after about two weeks of growth and were putting on size fast. It was fun to squirt in some shrimp and come back in a few minutes to look for these little gray slivers with huge orange bellies; it made counting the babies a lot easier. The little runt could barely eat the baby shrimp and consequently was not growing much. It didn’t take very long until one of its siblings made a meal out of the little diamond tetra.

Now, after almost two months, the remaining five diamond tetra are almost a ½" long and about 3/16" tall and look like tiny versions of their 1 ½" parents. After all this fuss to raise five fish I can honestly say there is no money to be made in cultivating diamonds in your home. Don’t raise tetras to get rich, just raise them to see a sparkle and shimmer in your fish tank.