I have a question about the breeding of black and yellow striped burrfish, at the moment I have two juvenile striped burrfish, I got them when they were about half an inch long from alligator point Florida. In the far future I was planning on breeding them because they are male and female, I was wondering if anyone has had any luck or if someone could give some tips on how they were successful or maybe knows of someone who has been.
Out of curiosity, how long have you had these guys so far?
I've never heard of anyone trying to breed these guys, but, from what I've seen, very little effort has been put into breeding porcupine fish and their relatives in general at this point (at least outside of commercial pufferfish farming in Japan).
Looking at these guys (
Chilomycterus schoepfii or
schoepfi) specifically, not much is known about their breeding even in the wild. They're thought to spawn offshore at night in July (at least toward the northern end of their range, up by New York and New Jersey), but none of that info seems to be confirmed.
They live in sea grass beds, bays, estuaries, coastal lagoons, and shallow reefs (though at least one source claims they basically migrate to the reefs in the winter), eating mollusks (clams, oysters, mussels, snails, etc.), crustaceans (crabs, hermit crabs, barnacles, etc.), larval eels and jellyfish, and possibly echinoderms (sea stars, urchins, sea cucumbers, etc.) - they sometimes graze on algae too, but it's not enough to sustain them. They produce pelagic/planktonic larvae (which are said to stay pelagic until 1-2cm), so you'll need a pelagic larva safe tank to rear any young in. The eggs they lay are said to be demersal (meaning they sink, they don't float) and non-adhesive (so they don't stick to the rockwork like clownfish eggs would).
That's about all of the info I can find on these guys and their breeding. Not knowing what size the larvae are when hatched, all the advice I can really offer is to try giving a variety of different pods/rotifers/BBS and see what the young eat, then keep offering them whatever they'll eat until they settle in the tank.
