Gourami Breeding (Bubblenest Builders) overview

This brief article on breeding gouramis is aimed at the smaller to medium sized bubblenest building gouramis (eg honey, pearl or lace, dwarf, giant Indian, and croaking gourami etc etc); the mouthbrooders (such as the Chocolate Gourami) are not included here.

In general, there are similar trends within the bubblenest builders.

Breeding Tank:
1. Set-up a separate tank for breeding.
2. The tank need be no larger than a 24x12x12 inch (60x30x30 cm) tank for even the larger pearl (lace) gourami, and can be somewhat smaller for smaller species.
3. The top should allow you to totally seal the tank (or you’ll need cling-film)
4. The water in that tank should be mature but clean (I’ll talk about water parameters later)….and preferably from the adult fish stock tank.
5. Add peat to the floor of the tank.
6. Allow the tank to settle for a few days (but a few weeks is best for breeding the small species such as croaking gourami) with some gentle aeration. That aeration may be via a small internal air-powered filter.
7. Place floating plants in the tank.
8. The water level should be 5 to 8 inches deep (5 inches for smaller species; 7 to 8 inches for larger species)

Breeding Tank Water:
1. As a general rule, the temperature should be about 80 degree F (27-28 C).
2. Ideally, soft acid mature water is required. But if the water is slightly hard then at least the added peat will help add some acidity and peat components to the water.
3. Gouramis do not live in filth. There is a difference between clean mature water and filth.
4. The added peat will also provide a substrate on which small microscopic creatures will proliferate: these will be very useful to the generally very small bubblenest gourami fry.
5. Aeration can be a problem as it will disturb the building of the bubble nest. So it may be best to not have any aeration during breeding.
6. If you have no filtration (recommended) then add some ammonia removing resins/zeolites/molecular sieves to the floor of the tank.
7. gouramis do not like sudden changes in water quality….so take care when transferring the fish to a breeding tank of differing water quality. Some species are very fussy about water quality changes.

The Adults:
1. They need to be mature enough to breed (and not have obvious deformities)
2. They should be conditioned on good quality flake food and frozen food (eg bloodworm) until the female is starting show a blumpness.
3. At some stage the adults will need to be separated for a period prior to breeding. (now, some may simply breed…but you often need to separate).

Introducing the Adults to Breeding:
1. You may need various tactics to tempt them to breed. Here are the general initial tactics for introducing male and female to each other:
a. Place Male in breeding tank on his own for a few days, and then add the female; or
b. Place Male in the breeding tank on his own for a few days, and then add the female behind a glass partition and watch for signs of interest from both fish (colour displays; body displays; head-up spinning behaviour; pointing ‘feelers’ at each other); or
c. Adding the female to the breeding tank for a few days and then adding the male directly works for many species.

Adding the female or male is best done towards the end of the night...as morning light is an often useful trigger in spawning.

2. There should be plenty of hiding spaces for the female.
3. Do not remove the female unless she is being severely attacked by the male….breeding can be quite aggressive anyway, so you need to recognise what is normal breeding behaviour, and what is a pending dead female.

The Spawning
1. The male should start to build a bubble nest, and may drive the female away during the building. Then he may start to tempt her over only to drive her away again: that is normal.

2. Some breeding behaviour of gouramis is quite comical (I particularly like the honey gourami displays).
3. It may be a day or two before the male decides to build a nest: be patient but observant.
4. If the male doesn’t start building a nest, then try adding a piece of non-toxic floating plastic (yellow or straw coloured) or some bubble-wrap to the surface to encourage him to build (and maybe to impress the female a little more).
5. When ready to finally spawn, the pair will go through several embraces of the female releasing eggs and the male picking those up to place in the bubble nest.
6. When the male starts to drive the female away after spawning, then remove the female.

The Eggs and the Young:
1. Make sure that cling-film is sealing the top of the tank. !!
2. The male will tend the eggs for about 1 to 2 days until they hatch.
3. After the hatching, the male will look after the young for about 3 to 4 days (again, that does depend upon species).
4. After that time, or when the male obviously starts to lose interest in looking after the young, remove the male.
5. Add gentle aeration by means of a small internal air-driven sponge filter.
6. The young are very small and require small food.
7. The infusorians or rotifers in the mature water and around the peat will form a great first food for the fry. For some species of gourami, that is the maximum size of food that the fry will take.
8. For larger species, the first food can be freshly hatched brine shrimp (but if that is the only source of food then you will stand to lose most of the fry and apart from the bigger individuals).
9. Commercial Liquid Fry Feed is good for all newly hatched gourami. An additional supplement is frozen rotifers.
10. Within a week of spawning, many fry will be able to take finely powered dried food.
11. The cling-film seal must be kept in-place for at least 2 weeks after hatching (it can be removed for feeding of course).
12. Water changes: 10% every day is ideal, but you need to be careful of sucking out young fry. If the water is mature in the first place, then there is limited need to do water changes until after about 10 days.

This is almost identical to breeding Siamese fighting fish, and so follow this for breeding them (the difference being how you introduce the male and female).

When selecting adults for breeding, be selective:
do not just chose any crap parent just to get some fry.

Avoid parents with thin caudal penduncle (the base of the tail); avoid parents with deformed gills or deformed backs; be careful of breeding from fish that clearly have a viral infection.

Damages done to a fish during its life (eg ripped fins) are not a particular problem to worry about. It is the deformities that may be passed down through generations that should be avoided.

The quality of gouramis has somewhat decreased over the years: this is an opportunity for selecting the best parents in order to help perpetuate the best quality traits being passed down to the next generation.

Breeding from wild-caught fish is an ideal, but not all wild-caught gourami are as easy to plonk into any old tank as you would find with their captive-bred cousins.

And as an end note (for now), if anyone thinks that I recommend a tank no bigger than a 60 litre for breeding the true giant gourami……then you’re misreading the first line !!! …plus I have no experience whatsoever of breeding giant gourami (Osphronemus goramy) and am not qualified to say what size of tank you need (if someone knows then let me know….with photos of the spawning as well, and they must be of your own spawning and not something from a zoo !!!).

ian

I added a line....

Adding the female or male is best done towards the end of the night...as morning light is an often useful trigger in spawning.

another tip is that if the pair need more tempting then let the tank receive a small amount of morning light....or mimic that by having a light shining from sideways onto the top of the tank for a few hours.

ian

Thanks a million for this article Ian!

With your permission, I might add it in our articles' section on breeding.

Valerie

Valerie wrote:

Thanks a million for this article Ian!

With your permission, I might add it in our articles' section on breeding.

Valerie

That'll be fine.

ian

This excellent article is hurting me quite a bit. The reason being I was offered a beautiful pair of wild caught Thick Lipped Gouramis about 6 months ago which I turned down on the basis of not having a clue how to breed them apart from the easy peasy lines that Google throws up, but that's life I suppose.

I also visited a Forum member's apartment a few weeks ago who was trying in vain to breed Pearl Gouramis-I bet he's raging too for he's subsequently moved the pair on. I suggested to him that the pair were only about 60-70% of their full size and may have not yet reached sexual maturity.

So, generally speaking, when do Gouramis reach sexual maturity?

Dave

@DJK......Gouramies will often breed at about half size; the smaller species need to be bigger than that though.
But, a half-sized adult may be a stunted 'full-grown' adult one as well.

If the male is starting to show signs of breeding (eg colours and behaviour) then they are ready for breeding.

Pearl (or Lace if you wish to call them that) grow to around 4 to 5 (or 6) inch body length (excluding tail...so add an extra inch to that for the tail). You tend not to find too many at that size.
So they will breed at about half that length if they have come to sexual maturity.

I think that many people simply walk by pearl gouramis in the shop as they are small and look drab (the gouramis, not the people ). That is a great pity as they are one of the fish that built the hobby.

My true honey gourami with proper jet black throats and marine-perfect colours (not the red robin things...although Justine does have some of them) are probably going to go into a spawning tank next. I think that they are worth it even if that means giving the young away to people to keep a good fish in the hobby.
I'm overrun at present with my siamese fighting babies where I'm doing a genetic study of them, and some Nothobranchius young somewhere (actually....the newly hatched ones today are in kilner jars beside my laptop as I type....along with 4 tanks of siamese fighting fish !!, so I do know where thet are) but I'll have to make space soon for some other breeding.

Today I saw some snakeskin gourami for sale....lovely large fish, but I'll wait to see how they are as they are in a shop that I do not buy fish from.

What does a gourami cost? 3 to 5 euro (maybe a bit more for some)...that is nothing for a great fish (if you watch out for some pretty duff virus laden ones though).

Maybe the Chocolate gourami breeding article is next, but I wanted to do a piece for people starting out in fish keeping to have a go at breeding fish that need a little work (as opposed to kribensis or guppies) but are pretty easy to keep. Chocolate gourami are not easy to keep, not easy to breed, and not something I'd be tempting someone starting out to try.

So, go on, DJK.....get some more and have a go (it's gonna cost you a tenner)

ian

this is my bible

igmillichip wrote:

So, go on, DJK.....get some more and have a go (it's gonna cost you a tenner)

ian

Thanks Ian for your follow-up post. Indeed the pearl/blue/dwarf/honey/kissing are exceptional value at roughly €5 a pop. Now, I was talking about wild caught thick lipped gourami which I'm informed are rare. The seller quoted me €25 for the pair which in hindsight was good value-the male in particular been stunning.

Having said that with my angelfish letting me down yet again at breeding I'll get a pair of pearls and give them a shot.

Thanks again.

Dave

At long last ... I compiled the information above into an article and added it to our Articles section .

Thank you Ian for your input ...

Were you talking about an article on Chocolate Gourami next ?!

Valerie

That looks great Valerie. I should have done some photos to go with originally.

I hope that people might be inspired to get hold of some nice specimens and start breeding them. Dwarf gourami might be a nice place to start....but securing half decent parent fish in the first place is not always easy at present (even though I do a pair of superb german bred fish that look very very similar to wild caught specimens I remember of years ago).

The chocs....that would be a more complete article on care of them as they are not the easiest of species to have thrive in a tank. Arguably, in some respects it is a bit like some species of mouthbrooding bettas....breeding is by virtue of keeping them alive in the first place.

It is a pity that not many places sell Chocolate Gourami that often: they are pretty inexpensive fish when they do arrive; they are little characters; and with the ease of getting RO water and good water treatments if needed makes things so much easier nowadays.

My water supply used to be from Birmingham....and talk about being rubbish for these type of fish. RO water was not available, distilled water cost a packet, water treatments were limited to the recently introduced AquaSafe when I started off with Chocolates.....a lot of hard work in them days.
The water is the least of the problems with what is available today....sloppy fishkeeping, however, will negate any good quality water supply. !

ian

If you want to add pictures, I can place them in the article without any issue. You can send them to me at the photo competition email address if you have any. I'd make the article a little more airy !

Please feel free (Ian and everyone else) to publish more articles ... our library needs a little development.

Thanks - Valerie

igmillichip wrote:

This brief article on breeding gouramis ian

if thats brief, i can't wait for the in depth version

seriously good article ian and a good read. covers all the important points.
a few pictures would be a great addition.

Ian thats brilliant mate fair paly. i would have no idea how to breed anything and this has me thinking hmmmmm ha fair play keep up the good work