I have shown many pictures of the displaying male/courtship behaviour in the past ……….. but none of some fry. That’s due to the lamentable fact that there have never been any young from this pair of P. nagyi. They are the first paros I’ve got, they mate constantly and have clutches – but no fry at all. I changed tanks, changed water parameters – with no visible effect.
Now I would like to tell you a funny story: By the end of last year I kept them in a 25 liter-tank which I provisionally divided in two parts by sliding in a vertical glass pane. The two parts of the tank had different sizes – one about one third of the tank, the other two thirds, consequently. The partition was not completey close, there were small gaps of a few milimeters – which was intended! In the smaller part I put some freshwater shrimps (Caridina simonii), in the bigger part my pair of P. nagyi. I wanted to provide the adult shrimps with shelter from the paros to enable a good reproduction – and hoped that the very young shrimp offspring would pass through the very small gaps into the paro part of the tank to provide the paros with a shrimp meal now and then. That’s to outline my intentions.
I can not say if it worked properly or not – the shrimp lived happily in their part of the tank, the paros bred and bred …. and no young.
One day I watched the shrimp side of the tank – and saw this:
I saw this young fish once, had just enough time to take some photos – and never saw it again. It can only be an offspring of my nagyi pair – they were the only paros which lived in this tank, and I generally do not move water plants or so from one tank with young to another – to avoid “importing” fry of a different species.
After a while the paro part of the tank became “dirty” (the shrimp side in contrast as clean as can be!!). I put the paro pair in a fresh tank and removed the dividing pane in the old tank to give the shrimp more space and enable them to clean the whole tank. And I put in 4 Boraras urophthalmoides which were left from a bigger swarm.
From time to time I thought what might have happened to the young fish I had seen once and never again. I believed it to be dead because I would have expected it to show without fear with the Boraras swimming around, if it was still alive.
Last week I watched the shrimps and Boraras and suddenly found myself eye to eye with a well grown young paro. Again – just enough time to take a (bad) picture – and he was gone. I felt like the persons who claimed to have seen the Yeti or Bigfoot – they say they saw it clear and sharp but only once for so short a time that no one believes them.
So – here’s the one and only picture of the one and only Yeti offspring of my P. nagyi: