Having trouble breeding some of those beautiful non-annual killies that you’d really like to keep?
Here’s a method to try.
In a five or ten gallon tank place well aged water. Add a generous bottom covering of sphagnum peat moss (the long, stringy kind, not the finely ground up peat), a couple of inches deep. Fill the tank with floating plants, water sprite or hornwort, for example. You might or might not include a foam filter or an airstone. Add fish, one to several pair, depending on the species.
Feed fish as usual and do regular water changes. Eggs incubate and hatch in the sphagnum peat, and the fry have plenty of hiding places and a constant food supply from the flora that inhabit the decaying peat and the plants. Every few months conduct a major cleanup of the tank, removing most of the water and the majority of the bottom matter and replacing it with fresh.
This method will work with many of the plant and substrate spawning non-annual killifish species.
G.C.K.A. Newsletter, March 1998