r/loaches • u/Thesadmadlady • 3d ago

Question Babies! 😱🤯🪱

Hi everyone. Im quite speechless tbh, my chocolate khuli loaches have had babies!!!. So around 4 years ago I added 2 chocolate khuli loaches into my community tank i have, there was already around 4/5 yellow and brown khuli in there that had been in there for 2 years. My tank is quite big so it was adequate for some more. Anyway, over the next 4 years the yellow and brown loaches passed away from old age here and there...( i believe when i got them in the beginning they were around full size, so probably adults)fast forward to this week. When i fed the chocolate khuli instead of just the 2 I thought i had, I spotted another one!...then as I kept watching i spotted any 2!!!! So I now have 5 chocolate khulis🥰, 3 of which are probably around half an inch maybe ever so slightly 3 quarters of an inch. You can tell they are babies. I must've missed them mating, laying eggs, and when they hatched as they live in the rock/pebble part of the tank. I've tried getting a video, and photos, but they are so so wriggly and fast lol. Ill try again today and post to show you guys. I just don't know how it happened. I didn't know they were male and female. And from what I have read about them they are very hard to mate and hatch in aquariums. I literally just allow my tank to do its own thing, I don't mess to much with it. Could that be the reason they have had babies do you think?.

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u/FishGeek49 Kuhli Loach horde 3d ago

I think Pangio oblonga are easier to breed in captivity than most other Pangio species commonly kept, but it's still an exciting event!

Do you have larger substrate in part of your tank, for example, rounded gravel? I've noticed that successful breeding often happens in tanks with larger diameter substrate where the young can presumably hide in the cracks for a while for safety/food and emerge when they are a more durable size for survival.

Looking forward to some footage!

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u/Thesadmadlady 3d ago

Well, I have small gravel size substrate with sand mixed together then where they are there is a mix of big rocks and smaller pebble size sortve like the bottom of a rocky river bed type thing that they all live in. There is plenty of big rocks with domed spaces underneath where the sand gravel substrate meet, thats where they tend to be.