Reproducing Nudis ;)

[NateHanson]

I added a pair of lettuce nudibranchs on Friday, and two days later I had two ribbons of eggs on the glass.

I haven't seen this sort of thing in almost a year in my tank, so I thought it might be a decent guess that they were nudi eggs.

Any chance of raising these buggers? Should I move them to my low-flow fuge? Before or after they hatch? What do baby nudis eat?

Has anyone tried this? Apparently Nudis lay eggs every couple days and don't have a larval stage (if I recall my reading correctly), so maybe they're good candidates.

Nate

 

[NateHanson]

Ok, so I remembered wrong about the larval stage.

Each species lays its fertilized eggs in a characteristically shaped cluster; some in spirals, strings or flat sheets. Eggs develop and hatch as free-swimming veliger larvae with a rudimentary coiled shell. The shell is lost with the larvae metamorphosing into a miniature adult settling on the bottom.
Captive rearing is complicated due to the unicellular algae diets and prolonged planktonic phases of the veligers.

 

[Reef55]

busting out the snowblower in anticipation? Congrats on the eggs by the way!

 

[NateHanson]

Yep the snowblower is good to go.

 

[Kim]

Nate I've had a few manage to survive in my tank. My tank relative to others is low flow but I think the biggest factor I have going is I have tons of Bryopsis. My nudi's laid some of the eggs in the bryopsis fields directly and some on the glass. I think the ones that survived were in the bryopsis. That is just a guess though. But since nothing else eats the bryopsis I think they had a chance since nothing else went near it.