Reefs.org Forums

[The Escaped Ape]

Mental bookmark made. I'm going to head over and see if this place has any info on it.

[cjdevito]

Well, dunno what you'll find there... but here's Tropica's article on the stuff:

http://www.tropica.dk/article.asp?id=731&type=news

[The Escaped Ape]

Huh. I'm shocked. Just looked on the forum I thought would have lots of info, but nothing. Maybe because it's a submersed form. Thanks for your link though!

[Sean : EbN]

Hello guys,

I have really enjoyed this thread. I've been a fish hobbyist for 15 years with most of my time being spend in marine. I have a 350 gallon reef and a separate 250 gallon propagation set-up as well as a couple of nano reefs.

Ever since I picked up the first Amano book in 1994 I have been enamored with the iwagumi design! I am FINALLY getting something started... here is what I'm doing...






This is a ADA Mini M set-up on my wifes desk in our office. I will be working on this one first and then a 29 gallon traditional plastic framed glass tank on birch furniture second.

Thanks for posting the links... I appreciate the advice on aquaspotworld.com and the Phyto certs. I think I am going that way instead in hopes of avoid any nuisance algaes.

Good Luck!

[cjdevito]

Yeah, those little ADA tanks are really cool. I'd like to do a 30P (12"x12"x12") one of these days, myself.

To be fair, I really have gotten nice plants and good service from Robert Hudson & AquaBotanic. It's just that, in addition, I've also gotten cladophora, duckweed, frogbit, bazillions of snails, and utricularia gibba (a mild nuisance) from them as well.

Just be advised if you order from AquaSpot that the shipping is rather involved. All US orders go out in one large, group shipment once every 2-4 weeks. From Singapore to Los Angeles through customs, on to their US distributor. They break the shipment into it's individual orders, repack them, and then send them for delivery to the end customers. Total transit time is in the neighborhood of 4-6 days so I wouldn't recommend it during really cold or really hot weather.

On the plus side, they've got some great items that are very difficult to come by domestically. Take a look at their subwassertang, their mosses, utricularia and their rotala selection.

[cjdevito]

Killifish are a lot like Lays Potato Chips. It's hard to stop with just one (species).

Photos tomorrow

[vitz]

just wait 'till you get turned onto the cynolebias complex

[The Escaped Ape]

Hello guys

Hey Sean. Treat us and start a tank build thread of your own. I'm always on the look-out for inspiration.

[cjdevito]

just wait 'till you get turned onto the cynolebias complex

Oh, believe me, I always have liked the south americans. Argentine Pearlfish and Maratecoara Lacortei (I'm adding a photo of this species below, just because it's such a treat) especially. I've only been able to source them as eggs though, and I just don't have a place to house them in numbers if I were to get a decent hatch rate.



Today's additions - assuming they are delivered alright by fedex today, considering the weather - are nothobranchius

[cjdevito]

Got the fish with no problems, and they're stunning. Going to have to wait a day or two til they're settled before I can take the photos though - they're very timid at the moment.

I've got two pairs, one of nothobranchius rachovi (aquarium strain) and one of nothobranchius guentheri 'Zanzibar'. No attempt will be made to raise fry from either pair for fear of crossbreeding (a huge no-no with killifish), I'll just appreciate them while they last. Which, being annuals, means probably 6-10 months.

[cjdevito]

..and, of course, as soon as I write that last post I go back over to look at the tank and I see both pairs. Getting down with their bad selves.

Jesus, guys. You've just been in transport for 22 hours in water that was probably 65 degrees by the time I got you out of it. Give yourselves some recuperation time between diving into the soil, wouldja?

[cjdevito]

Not a good photo, but one of the male nothos came out of hiding long enough for me to try and snap some pics.

[cjdevito]

I've been doing a bit of research and as near as I can tell, the fish pictured above and sold to me as nothobranchius rachovi is actually nothobranchius korthause. Not a big deal considering I have no plans to breed them and care/behaviour is identical between the two, but still, I hate buying misidentified livestock.

Regardless of species, the new pairs are continuing to settle in nicely and are gradually becoming bolder and spending more time out in the open. Funny enough the females are almost always out and about, it's just the males who're timid.

Hopefully I'll have some good shots to post shortly.

[cjdevito]

This thread's going to get quiet for a while, between one project and another that I have going on at the moment. But so you all have something to look forward to....

Expect a burst of activity around mid april....

And then expect a much larger one around mid may

[The Escaped Ape]

Rubs hands together in gleeful anticipation...

[tazdevil]

Pardon my stupidity, but whats wrong with crossbreeding killifish?

[cjdevito]

Pardon my stupidity, but whats wrong with crossbreeding killifish?

To answer that I've got to give a little background on killifish. Killifish, at least those obtained from reputable sources, are identified by species and then by collection code. A few are further identified by collection year after the collection code, if multiple collecting trips were made to the same locale. For example: Nothobranchius rachovi Beira 98, which designates n. rachovi collected in an area identified as Beira back in 1998.

The reason why this matters is because of the genetic diversity within the same species between one collection locale and another. Aphyosemion bivitatum Funge is quite different, visually, from a. biv Volcanum or a. biv Tiko. The reason for the large number of different strains of the same species has to do with these fish rapid turnover of generations and the complete isolatedness of one breeding population to the next, even if only a few hundred feet seperates them. Crossbreeding different strains of the same species muddies the strains and loses what makes each unique. Add in to that the annual nature of many of these fish, and their unusual housing, breeding and rearing requirements, and you end up with lines that are only maintained in captivity by diligent effort on the part of hobbyists. Should crossbred progeny ever end up in a main breeding line, the entire captive strain could become contaminated.

And this is easier to happen then you might think. Crossbred males are usually very easy to spot, since the males are so colorful and distinct to begin with. But with the females it can be totally impossible to tell visually. My aphyosemion australe female looks like a particularly ugly beige female guppy. My two notho females, of different species let alone strains, look exactly alike; two vaguely pupfish looking fish, light lilac in color.

It gets worse when you start talking about crossing two different species. Within the same family (and within certainly closely related families) this is easy to accomplish. Males and females of different species will readily breed and produce offspring. Most of the males produced will be sterile, and in succeeding generations the sterility only becomes more endemic until none of the males descended from such a cross can breed. While it's possible to get some truly stunning looking fish this way, they simply can't be maintained. With the amount of effort it takes to maintain lines in the first place, especially where annuals are concerned (some of the extremes include eggs that can take as much as nine months to be ready to hatch, in a fish whose lifespan won't even reach nine months long), it's kind of wasted effort. And even worse, if the fish get disseminated to other aquarists they're stuck with fish that are sterile (or who's offspring will be).

Killies are more at risk for habitat destruction than most other organisms, if only because a certain 5' pond may be the only place where a particular strain of a particular species is found. Many strains present in the hobby may no longer exist in the wild for this reason.

[tazdevil]

Wow, that's very area/geog specific demands. I would think with that high a specific demand for a area, they would be at high risk for exinction. Thanks for the info.

[cjdevito]

Well, the other thing with killis is, they're ridiculously easy to breed. Water conditions that would kill most other fish are just an invitation to these guys to spawn even more than usual

Very few of these fish are collected from the wild for the hobby. Maybe three of four collecting trips go on a year, and those usually bring back only a couple dozen fish each. There isn't much need for more than that because it's a safe bet that those few dozen fish will have spawned all the way home in their shipping container

But yes - you get a little construction that dries up a drainage ditch, and poof, a strain can be gone for good. Which is the reason why so many north american native killifish are already extinct or on the brink of it.

[cjdevito]

This thread's going to get quiet for a while, between one project and another that I have going on at the moment. But so you all have something to look forward to....

Expect a burst of activity around mid april....

And then expect a much larger one around mid may

Okay. Change of plans
The mid april stuff has been bumped to mid may. So I'm going to switch things around and do what was going to be the mid may stuff now.

This aquascape has been wrapped up. Poof. I have a new one in the works, with a new thread going up momentarily. But I wanted to spend some time to wrap this one up properly.

Why do a complete re-scape?
It let me correct a few things I'd done in my inexperience. I mixed hairgrass and HC together. It looks great, but the problem is that the hairgrass is incredibly invasive with it’s runners, and tons of new hairgrass shoots were constantly growing under and through the HC. Even though I continuously cut them down when they appeared, they were still working beneath the scenes to uproot the HC and push it up. In future, if I were to use hairgrass or any other micro sword plant, I would use thin sheets of transparent acrylic as dividers within the soil. That would largely prevent runners from spreading out from where I’d want to keep the hairgrass.

I suspect HC could stand up to the tunneling of my killies if it didn't also have to deal with the effects of the hairgrass.

Another issue was in hiding the intake of my filter behind a very dense planting of stem plants. While this was aesthetically a good choice, it really cut down on the effectiveness of the filter. A minor and easily solved issue, but worth mentioning.

There are two other reasons for the rescape. The first was that it gave me a way to completely eliminate the cladophora the tank has been dealing with. Excel has been keeping it in check, but if I skip even a single day of overdosing with it I see new growth. The second reason is because I saw an aquascape someone else did using some unusual plants that I fell in love with and decided to try and recreate. More on that in the other thread.

One last bit of news on the old tank… as I was pulling the old scape apart, I discovered about a dozen or so ¼” aphyosemion australe fry that had been hiding. Not only had I made no effort to raise them, I hadn’t even known they were there til then. They were mostly living underneath the HC carpet.

Onwards to the new thread:
Keep Off the Flesh-Eating Grass