Sturisomatichthys fry

Hi everybody, I have a trio of what I belive to be Sturisomatichthys Lieghtoni or "colombia 1" (1 male,2 females) although they were sold to me as Sturisoma Aureum.They are housed with 5 Farlowella acus,2 Hemiloricaria eigenmanni and 4 Hemiloricaria pava in a well planted 130 litre tank.After about 3 weeks in thier new environment they spawned on the side of the aquriam produceing 26 ova,I left the male to care for them,he is a very attentive father constantly fanning the ova and driving off any intruders.After 6 days the ova had developed to the piont of being able to see the young fry inside and hatching looked to be imminent so with a new scalpel blade I removed the ova from the glass and transfered them to a small plastic container with a large hole in each bottom front corner plugged with sponge,water delivery was via a tube branched from the main pump and created a fair current in the rearing container that was stuck to the glass with suckers,its top just above the water line.The fry hatched later that day and for the first 24 hours I fed nothing,I then started feeding them on Spirulina algae tablets(crushed almost to powder) and powdered flake food.I also added a couple of small pebbles that I had been growing green adherent algea on.I fed each afternoon and removed any uneaten food the next morning religously,the fry were observed feeding often and everything was going well with them growing to 7-8mm from the 2-3mm that they were when they hatched.On the 16th day from hatching i went into my fish room to find that they had all perished for no apparent reason,they all still looked like they were fine but were all dead.I was gutted!!Two days later the adults spawned again so I had another go at rearing the fry when they hatched,but the line of events was pretty much the same with the whole brood perishing for no apparent reason at about 18 days this time.Siince then the adults have spawned at approx'10-12 day intervals and I have tried to raise the fry 6 times,I have tried different foods like crushed red peppers,peas,artemia napuli,even live daphnia but the result is always the same with the fry dying at around 14-18 days.I'm assuming that the fry are not recieving enough nutrition from the food i'm feeding them or that there is some other deficiency causing them to perish.If anybody has any ideas as to what i am doing wrong or has been succesful in breeding this species please let me know as i'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what is going wrong.Thanks for reading and hopefully someone will be able to help me,Happy fishkeeping all.

Well done on the spawnings, bad news about the deaths. Have you tried hard boiled egg yolk? very nutritious. I buy egg yolk powder and my fish go mad for it. Are you keeping up on water changes as they could be very sensitive to any changes in water quality. Im hoping someone else will come along with some more ideas for you, dont give up.

ime, this genus tends to throw out pretty hardy fry. crushed flake and peas worked for me, so whatever youve been feeding them is more than sufficient.

check the water, just in case. sometimes these things just happen.

Are you doing daily water changes?

what a shame, I would guess it is a water problem, perhaps oxygen level or something else. maybe too much water current makes them tired, or build up of nitrite or something? can you set up small qt tank and once they are free swimming maybe move them into qt tank, doing a largish w/c using some of the parent tank water so ph and other parameters dont change too much.