Introduction

Most hobbyists have difficulty keeping wild-caught Banggai Cardinalfish alive due to stress, parasites, etc. In fact, the majority of the wild-caught Banggais do not live for more than a month in home aquariums. For this reason, 50,000 ~118,000 Banggais are collected from the wild monthly! Dr. Alejandro A. Vagelli, the leader of Banggai conservation, has traveled multiple times to Indonesia to study them in the wild. Along with Dr. Frank Marini in Houston, he tried to list Banggais on CITES, but was unfortunately rejected in summer 2007. We thank them for all their efforts. For more information, go to the credit section for related articles.

Although breeding Banggais can be difficult in terms of obtaining a breeding pair and getting them to spawn, the babies, however, are extremely hardy and easy to raise. In this article, I will explain my method of breeding Banggai Cardinalfish and hopefully interest you to help conserve the shrinking population of Banggais in the wild by breeding them at home.

Getting Started

Materials:

• Nursery tank or a Breeding net
• Air pump w/ tubing and air stone
• A tubing valve to adjust the bubbles
• Small 25W heater
• Thermometer
• Pipette
• Baby brine shrimp
• Selcon

Note: if using a breeding net, you won’t need an air pump or heater or thermometer

Setup:

Banggai babies are very hardy, and therefore it is not necessary to have a separate nursery setup for them. You can just put a net or a breeding net in
your main tank. The breeding net can be various sizes. If you have a large batch of 50+ or if you have multiple batches, you can make the breeding net
out of PVC pipes and mesh. The only trouble with these nets is that you’ll have to wash them every so often since slime would build up on the walls.
You can also set up a nursery tank for the babies, just simple heater, thermometer, bubbler will do. You can even add a piece of live rock and micro
algae for aesthetics, filtration, and hiding place for the babies, especially when the bigger ones may tend to pick on the smaller ones as they get older.

A net set inside the main tank	A separate plastic nursery tank
2-month old Banggais in a 1.5 gallon pico with rocks and corals	Hiding in a fake plastic plant

Banggai babies can pretty much live in any setup, even in your refugium as long as there’s enough food. They are really easy to raise!