Enjoying Breeding Fish

This is 1 part of USM Fish House. Inside here where u able to find many aquatic lecturer research base. They rare the fish in this house. This corner is belongs to my supervisor, Dr Alexander Chong. Mostly of the fishes are zebrafishes, swordtail fishes, diskette fishes and etc.

One of our lab member is washing the aquarium. He is the graduated master student, going to continue his Phd at USM with Dr Alexander Chong too.

Male Swordtail fish

Male zebrafishes

This small small fish tank where we used to breed pairs of zebrafishes. ( 1 male and 1 female is located at each tank). Then cover with dark clothes to create a period time in the dark.
Then, the next morning, once the dark clothes is opened, sunshine shine into the water. Once the divider is lifted up, pairs of zebrafish will start to mate and external fertilization occurs. Usually, after 20-30 mins, we stop them from further mating by separating them. Research have been to prove that the first 30 mins fish eggs is high in quality. So, we would only like to collect good quality of eggs.

Usually, all the master students will take turn to breed the fish, twice in a week in order to keep the stock. Normally, they will prepare 80 - 100 pairs zebrafish to breed.

Look!! I am watching the fish to mate and further collecting the fish eggs as a sample.

Usually, the male and female zebrafish will be separated by a transparents divider and kept them in dark period for 1 night. Next day, the divider will be lifted up to let the zebrafish to mate

See... ONCE the divider is lifted up, the male zebrafish is in a wild, keeping on chasing the female zebrafish. After a while, the female will release oocyte into the water while the male zebrafish release sperms. External fertilization occurs.

Woow... Plenty of eggs..... Their eggs are so tiny, soft and transparent in colour.

After 3 days, the fish eggs will hatch and growth into small tiny fishes