Kuhli Loaches

[Christine]

I'm looking for a bit of information on Kuhlis. I did google it and came up with mixed reports of spawn methods/temperatures. I saw one or two mentions of possible bubblenesting... more mentions of egg scattering.

The reason I ask is I have 2 kuhlis in a small quarantine tank. I set it up with a sand bottom because when the kuhlis arrived one was VERY pink instead of the normal coloration (shipping stress) and I wanted to make him/her feel more secure. So they got a a sand bottom a small flower pot and a couple plants. Well, I went to do a water change and I removed some water but then I ran out of my aged water. I opted to wait til the next day to refill so that I could use aged water. Well, the next day brought what looked like a small bubble nest in the top corner of the tank. That was about 3 days ago and the bubbles have gotten bigger and bigger and both loaches seem to swim straight up into it an awful lot. Is it possible these guys are working on a bubble nest? Or might this be just the bubbles that appear in tanks from time to time. It actually looks alot like a small betta nest. I kinda want to fill the tank all the way or move them out of the quarantine tank to a normal tank but if they are working on spawning... I don't really want to interfer with that. Tho, I have to say neither loach looks particularly egg heavy to me.

Any thoughts on this? Has anyone actually seen their kuhlis bubblenesting or is this mostly just a rumor?

[SueM]

It could be possible, but I've never heard of them building bubble nest's.
A gravid female is very easy to spot, most people think they have bloat.
Here is a good pic with a good article.........
http://www.loaches.com/species_pages/kuhli_eggs.html

[Christine]

OW! That just looks painful LOL. Thanks Sue. That would be hard to miss! Definitely neither look like that.

[SueM]

Doesn't it though!!!
You can see why people panic and fire up the meds.

[flamingo]

They may be building the nest or it's just the water quality. Not saying your water is bad right off the bat or anything but sometimes it does happen.

Kuhlis are actually egg layers, usually laying small green egg clusters on plant thickets. If there are any other fish in the tank they will eat the eggs. My cousin had them breed out of the blue one time to see the eggs get eaten by a small chorydora in less then a minute.

Also, just because there's bubbles on the look like they're going to have babies doesn't mean much when it comes to loaches. Most things like weather loaches and kuhlis go to the top and blow bubbles just for the heck of it, i've seen it a lot in hyper kuhlis.