Hi Peter,
Many thanks for your reply.
I think that Allan likes to see people continuing his work with Paros in Britain. For he did it for many years with great success and it ended abruptly. It’s really a pity for the British Paro scene (and the continental, too)!
It is a real shame based on what I hear from you and from others too, certainly the time I spent with him was very useful.
Surely, the filter sponge will produce quite a lot of edible organisms for the young fish.
Its something I have done often with Corydoras fry, it seems to get them off to a good start.
I know the first from Paramecium; it does work with vinegar eels, too. Fill the eel-loaden vinegar in a bottle with long narrow bottleneck (or breed them there already)so that the narrow bottleneck remains partly free. Then put a pad of cotton-wool in it with contact to the vinegar. And then fill the rest of the bottleneck gently with water. Two hours later you can harvest the eels by a pipette and feed them to the fish.
I have heard of this one but never tried it yet, I will have to give it a go. I have never heard of it for paramecium though. I just use a turkey baster to take the paramecium and the water they grow in and put it direct into the fry tank.
The second method is similar to the harvesting of micro: use a small amount of yeast in a bottleneck to attract the eels. After a while they creep out of the vinegar on the blank insides of the neck. You can harvest them with a fine brush.
This one I have never heard of for vinegar eels, it sounds like it would be quite tricky but also could be worth a try if the first method you have noted does not yield good results.
Today is the first day that I have seen one or two of the fry in their rearing tank, but I only got a fleeting glance at them as they swam off into the leaf litter.