hey! wait a tick!

SPAWN!

just peeked in tonite and noticed an egg, than many!
wonder which of the 5 females they came from.
theres only one male.
seems to have been triggered by a 75% water change and vac i did last night

Just a question - why such a large waterchange - 75%?

It's better to do frequent partial waterchanges over several days rather than 1 large waterchange, otherwise your tank may cycle again.

Here's a hint:

Females that recently spawned normally have a slightly more swollen cloaca than a female that didn't, but that's not always the case, just a personal observation.

one neat thing i noticed is that the eggs are all in places the axies never go.
just places that are well out of the way or difficult to get to.

the one cluster on the wood shown above would require the female to hang upside down under a log right at the waters surface.

some are tucked into crannies, but the biggest bunches are on top of a filter sponge that is stuffed in the intake area to keep the axies away from the intake and hold the filter in place,
that little trick would have requited the female to climb up the filter and hang onto the sponge.

Have you got an albino female? With the eggs being white it would suggest they have come from an albino. Melanoid and wildtype eggs usually are brown or white/brown.

Some of our wildtype/leucistic offspring eggs (from both parents) started off initially white then turned grey or darkish. If they've only been laid then it's still early days.

The worst bit to clean out when we found eggs were around and in the internal filter (some got sucked into the intake/inlet bit) or were stuck behind it or beneath it.

yeah i just did the tank cleanup, what a mess!
i few are unfertile, but most seem ok, i KNOW i missed about a quarter of them,
but i have 4 females, its not like i wont be tearing stuff up again soon.

well, it hasn't been very long but a few of the eggs are close to hatching.

most were un-viable but thats to be expected, the mother wasn't even 9 months old yet, but it would really be a pain to have to do a setup for only one male.

12 are left, a good number to start with. of course i just noticed today that another female is discharging little bits of jelly... so i reckon another batch is imminent.

ive got the current eggs in a little guppy rearing unit, I cant find the case for my camera and its got my batteries, so i cant get a recent shot.

I would have rather had eggs in the spring, then i could have just gotten some lake debris and BAM, free starter food. figured i could just teabag a bunch of daphnia out of it, but it seems my tank has plenty of them already, so ill just let them eat those until they are big enough for bloodworms.

wish i had some Tubificid Worms , i would just let them form a colony.

well, most of the viable eggs fell thru the slots in the guppy nursery... so im down to only 4, all of which are now hatched.
i sank a perforated cricket deli-pack into the water for a nursery, the holes are big enough for daphnia to get in.
so i learned a lesson, floating nursery good, but only if you make one yourself.
once the babies get bigger than baby guppies, i will split them into 2 groups of two
i immagine by the time they are "juveniles" ill have other eggs already.

ALSO i found my camera case, my daughter had it stashed in her "fort" all this time. so i have batteries again.

heres some pics, you cant see the babies well, but you can see dad snapping at the wiggling in the funny floating containers
without further ado.