Coral Red Pencilfish Nannostomus mortenthaleri

After thinking about it a bit more I'm leaning towards breeding Coral Red Pencilfish along Swamp Guppy and Galaxy Danio thanks to combined shipping. Of course all three would appreciate aquariums that have already been set up, so I'll work that into future posts.

Onto a bit about the Coral Red Pencilfish (Nannostomus mortenthaleri) itself... As I said before they come from the Rio Nanay in Peru, but I've found there are two different morphs. There is apparently one group from which the males have a more extensive red covering. They're shipped under the same name, so I don't know if one would be a subspecies or what. Practical Fish Keeping had a great article on keeping and breeding them, and I guess the males naturally tend to be very aggressive with each other in confined spaces, less so in captive bred specimens. I guess they're harder to breed than other pencilfish, but it sounds like the normal method adapted by egg scatterers, which means that separating the eggs from the parents reach as quickly as possibly is key to success. (I figure I can pull this off by using some kind of mesh boundry that the eggs can fall through for the entire bottom third of the aquarium with loose java moss covering that. I'll try something similar with the danio as well since they should be similar in that regard.)