Hi all,
I've never kept the coloured types, but the plain Black Skirt are an easy Tetra to condition, and they produce hundreds of small eggs.
You want a group of juveniles (the really big ones you see won't always spawn) and then feed them heavily on live food, they eat absolutely everything but white worms are good for this, after a while you should be able to pick the big fat ones as female, when they go really fat dark and shiny and start displaying pick a pair and place them in a tank with lots of java moss on the bottom, in a breeding trap. The eggs are minute and hatch really quickly, but the pair will try and eat the eggs even while they are still spawning. They don't need soft water to spawn, or a particularly dark tank. The fry are minute and not very mobile, they need really small food straight away, microworm size or smaller.
You can spawn a lot of Characins using this method, although in some cases you need very soft, high quality water to rear any fry, and some (Black Neons) need a blacked out tank or morning sunlight (Lemon Tetra). The advantage of java moss over marbles or a spawning mop is that the fry can often find bits to have a pick at (rotifers etc) amongst the moss even if they don't get any food, and it helps with water quality.
cheers Darrel
