TL;DR: I made a DIY hatchery for my luminatus eggs, and this post walks you through how I set it up and how it works.
🔹 The Hatchery Container
- I use a 30L (8 gal) food-grade plastic bin with a lid.
- It’s filled with 5L (1.3 gal) of pure RO water.
- A 25W heater keeps the temperature at 26°C (80°F).
- Inside the bin, I run airline tubing with T-fittings and air valves for adjustable airflow.
🔹 Airflow & Lids
The cups have tight-sealing lids, but I modified them with:
- 1 center hole: 6mm (0.23") for the airline + airstone
- 1 vent hole: 2mm (0.07") on the edge to let air escape
Each line ends with a small airstone inside the cup.
🔹 The Hatching Cups
- They are 600ml (20 fl oz) cups.
- Water inside is remineralized RO:
- Using SaltyShrimp GH/KH+ to 8 dGH / 4 dKH
- I prepare a 1L (33 fl oz) batch of this water and add 1 drop of 1% methylene blue.
- Weekly, I do a 50% water change for each cup using fresh solution.
🔹 Collecting the Eggs
- Eggs come from a small breeding tank with several spawning mops.
- Right now, I collect 2–3 days’ worth of eggs (around 18 eggs total in each cup).
- My setup is still new and yields are small, but I’ll increase the number of eggs later — and reduce how many days’ worth go into each cup.
🔹 Hatching Time
Based on what I’ve read and what other breeders report:
- Fastest hatches: ~5 days (at higher temps)
- Average: 10–12 days
This is my first iteration of the system, but it’s working cleanly and is easy to maintain.
Please feel free to critisize, it helps me improving, i want to make it the best possible, also, how do you guys are hatching your eggs usually ?
Posted by Jyxiaa
1 Comment
Looks like a good setup! I’ve been breeding P. paskai for couple of years but I’ve mostly been using a pretty lazy system. I toss a few adults, usually around 6, in a bare bottom 10 gallon with a very large much of java moss (about a quarter of the tank) with a sponge filter and feed them very heavily for about 2-3 weeks. Then I put the adult back in the community tank and babies will hatch out over the next few weeks. At 78F my eggs seem to take ~12-16 days to hatch.
Fry are super tiny but good eaters. I start them on hikari first bites as it floats and they hug the surface, I also have a decent bit of salvinia floating in the tank which holds a lot of tiny organisms for them to eat on. Once they are a little larger, maybe a week or so, I start feeding Aquarium coop easy fry and occasionally live baby brine shrimp. They hit maturity at around 3 months, I just moved by last batch into the main tank and the previous babies already spawned and I can see a few babies popping up.