The Invasion of the Whiptails, by Tom and Pat Bridges

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Author: Tom and Pat Bridges
Title: The Invasion of the Whiptails
Summary: The addition of Bamboo, RO water and crushed green beans helped to coax a pair of whiptails to spawn.
Contact for editing purposes: theo@aquarticles.com
email: tp.bridges@sympatico.ca
Date first published: May 1998
Publication:The Scat, St Catharines Aquarium Society, c/o http://www3.sympatico.ca/tp.bridges/home.html
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The Invasion of the Whiptails

By Tom and Pat Bridges
First published in "The Scat" - St. Catherine's Aquarium Society, Canada. March 2001
Aquarticles

If you read our article Breeding Sturisoma you know that we were surprised by a spawning of what some call "whiptail cats" but are better know to us as twig cats. For many years we have kept the small, well camouflaged, algae eaters that we call Whiptails.
They're Rineloricaria 'parva'.
Three of them were inhabiting a ten gallon tank with undergravel filtration and a piece of driftwood. In January we noticed that two of them were chasing each other around somewhat aggressively. A close examination, (and I do mean close because these cats almost disappear on a natural gravel bed), determined that both the chaser and the chasee had a tiny forest of bristles on each pectoral fin. (The pectorals are those fins that look a little like wings on an airplane.) They were males. The third whiptail had no bristles and so was probably a female.
We did four things.
1) We removed the male chasee.
2) We put a hollow piece of bamboo in the tank. (To keep it more or less in place we put it partially under the driftwood.)
3) We started to soften the water in the tank by using half RO (Reverse Osmosis) water for regular changes.
4) We added crushed green beans to their diet and carefully syphoned out anything that wasn't eaten by the next day.

The parva is in quotes because it's probably now a synonym for fallax if you follow Baensch. Parva means small and, since the fish never grow much over 4 inches long, it seems very appropriate.

Father whiptail started spending a lot of his time inside the bamboo tube. It must have been cramped because he couldn't completely spread his pectorals in there. One day in early February mother whiptail was nowhere to be seen in the tank. I got down and peered into the tube. Sure enough they were both crammed into that impossibly small space. She stayed in there all day and, as far as we know, most or all of the night. I was worried that they might be stuck and unable to get out but the next day there she was munching on a bean.
We couldn't get a good look at the eggs. All we could tell was that there was something stuck to the inside of the tube that hadn't been there before and that father whiptail was doing his best to keep water moving over its surface. As far as we know he never came out, even to eat, for the next 14 days.
On the 12^th day several tiny black whiptails were seen on the gravel and walls of the tank. By the end of the 14^th day we had removed approx. 100 babies and father was out and about looking for food.
The babies were housed in a 5 gallon tank filled with water from the hatching tank with the addition of a well aged sponge filter. They were fed generous amounts of baby brine shrimp twice a day supplemented by bits of crushed green bean and some of our agar spirulina concoction.
The lights have been kept off most of the time and some water has been changed every day. Growth has been quite rapid and, as of this writing, they inhabit three larger tanks and some are ready for auction. If you like small, quiet, almost invisible algae eaters, try them.
Caution: When you move them make sure the water conditions match closely or they may not survive.