Ditto! very cool. A lot of times young males don't really have the knack of holding the eggs for the full term (usually around 25 days) and they will end up losing them. I wouldn't worry too much. Eventually he will learn to keep them. If he does happen to keep them the full time, you can try and catch him and get him to release the juveniles in to a seperate tank to raise. My youngest male actually held and released eggs at only four months old! There were only 7 juvs but they all survived (and are swimming around other reefers tanks as I type this (hopefully!!)).
Here is what I do for my males; first make sure you keep track of when he started to fold the eggs. This is usually obvious since he stops eating. start counting days and if after about 23 days he is still holding, I try to remove him from the tank. Sometimes I can coral him in to fish catcher and he continues to hold the eggs, then I move him in to a 10G breeding tank to release the eggs. Other times I have to use a net to catch the males, in which case they tend to spit out the juvs in to the net. I move the male and the juvs in to a seperate tank that I set up just prior to moving him with water from the same display tank. Then I add a fake urchin and leave them overnight. Usually by the next day, the male has released all the juvs and they are starting to herd together in the corner or the urchn. I remove the male and put him in another tank, seperate from the female, so that I can feed him heavily for a couple of weeks before introducing him back to the female (since she will want to get busy as soon as he is back in the tank! If you don't wait, the male could starve). On the first night, I also start hatching my Brine Shimp so that I will have NHBS to fed the juveniles on day 2. They usually start eating right away. For the first week, I use only NHBS, so I have three hatches going each day so I can feed them while they are still newly hatched within a couple of hours. I feed them three time a day for the first week to 10 days. After that, I start using hathced BS that I enrich with Selcon and feed twice a day. Towards the end of the third week, I start mixing in cyclopeeze to the feeding as well as some larval growout food I have. By a month, they are off the live food and entirely on frozen or preparred food. A typical brood will be about 20 juvs, at one point I had about 90 or so juvs in my growout tank. That was very cool! I hope that helps!
Bob
