Sommaire pour April 2023 de Practical Fishkeeping

HAT COMES TO mind when you think of barbs? Is it fin nipping? Aggression, maybe? Perhaps you imagine species with notorious community tank reputations. And what about loaches? Nowadays, many of us immediately think of giants like the clown loach, or the many coldwater species. In this article, we want to showcase two incredibly peaceful and manageable species in a replica of their natural habitat. And we were delighted at how well they settled in to it! Please welcome the snakeskin barb, Desmopuntius rhomboocellatus, and the ‘knhli’, half-banded, or eel loach, Pangio semicincta. Meet the cast Snakeskin barbs—sometimes called rhombo barbs as a shortening of their species name—are cyprinids that originate from the streams and lakes of Borneo. Shoaling fish, they can be found in considerable congregations in the wild,…

DO FISH FEEL PAIN? It's part of an early philosophical question that caught my attention. Do other animals experience pain the way I do? It lies in the vein of ‘if a tree falls in a wood, does it make it sound?’ Of course, through physics, we know that a tree falling in a wood does indeed make a sound: waves of pressure travel through the air in a manner our brains interpret as sound, whether or not we are there to hear it. By a similar token, we know that some fish feel pain as we understand it. Knowing that these fish feel pain is informative for us when considering another philosophical choice. To wit: when is the right time to euthanise a dying fish? Palliative care First of…

NH: Alex, how did you fi rst get into piranha keeping? AG: A friend of mine had five Pygocentms nattereri, the so-called red-bellied piranha. When he decided to give them away, I overtook the group including the aquarium. I was 15 years old. I started with them because I've been fascinated by the rumours about these ‘dangerous’ fishes. Watching the P. nattereri of my friend I soon saw that public opinion about them is totally wrong. I realised there's an expanse of missing information. about these fish. Even after keeping piranhas for some years, I am fascinated by them every day. There's so much to discover about their behaviour and their individuality. Even individuals from the same species can have unique and diff erent traits! NH: How many species do…

IN THE EARLY summer of 2022, I was offered an array of fish by a friend of mine from a Congo import that I had missed out on. With a fish room at home, it's hard to not look out for a few special fish for oneself, and I did just that. A seldom seen species in the UK hobby (although seemingly increasing in availability and popularity) was listed: Microctenopoma ansorgii, sometimes given the common name of ornate climbing Perch. Microctenopoma, as the name implies, is a genus of smaller species that live in the shadow of their larger relatives, the Ctenopoma. Being anabantoids, they have genetic ties to the likes of better-known fi sh such as gouramis and Betta. All of these fi sh possess a labyrinth organ, a…

READER VISIT Scott Hall SCOTT HALL LOVES Poecilia wingei, and the wilder the better. You and I might know the fi sh better as ‘Endler's guppies’ but that won't wash in this house. ‘We don't use the ‘e’ word,’ Scott warned me the day before my visit to his west midlands home. Behind his house sits a shed, Scott's pride and joy, and a genetic repository that would make any livebearer aficionado lustful. 87 tanks, all modest in their proportions. All packed. It's a claustrophobic but alluring collection of life which, frankly, outshines any fi sh house I've ever seen for sheer colours. 75 diff erent strains of wild caught Poecilia wingei line four walls and a central column, all meticulously separated, all carefully ordered. This little oasis of life…

OUR AQUARIUMS ARE often compared to a puddle, which isn't really unjustified. In all too many community aquariums you'll find a variety of species kept together, given too little space and sustained by inadequate filtration. Anyone who has ever observed fish in nature, whether that be in the tropics or in a temperate local lake or river, can see just how much water is exchanged in a natural and dynamic environment. In a crowded aquarium, as any good aquarist knows, problems are inevitable without regular water changes and filter maintenance. In nature, only extreme events can lead to this kind of situation, where high volumes of fish are crowded into a confined space. If the situation does not resolve itself in good time, either an extreme of heat and a…

INSPIRATION Micropredator set-up ORDERING FISH ONLINE is always risky. Without seeing them in flesh you can't judge condition or sex, so you trust in the seller's goodwill and hope that you get what you ordered. Sometimes—after you open the package—you realise that even the species is wrong. Mislabelling (either accidentally or intentionally) is frequent with imports, making the life of importers a nightmare. Often, low value fish are labelled as something else but occasionally a rare fish is sold under some common name. The fish in this article arrived in the UK as red badis, Badis ruber, but it was clear from the beginning that it's an entirely different species. At first glance they looked similar—both belong to the Badidae family—but my fish had no pattern on their bodies and…

HABITAT Bolivian Pantanal YES, WE'D THROWN ourselves at the mercy of the Bolivian heat to collect killifish, but some nice Corydoras and a few other pleasant surprises made the trip much more enjoyable than it would have been without them. I have already written about most of the killies we collected during ‘CuFundulus 2022’ (Ed's note: See the January 2023 issue of PFK for this), but I can't resist the opportunity to write about some more. The eastern part of the area we sampled, bordering Brazil and in the vicinity of the Bolivian town of Puerto Suárez, has been an important centre of commerce and industry for more than a hundred years. The possibility to ship goods southwards via the Río Paraguay remains a huge benefit for inner Bolivia and this…

WE'RE COMING INTO a golden age of understanding coral health. Although there has been a keen interest since some of the earliest mass mortality events many decades ago, there has been a remarkable eff ort from modern scientists to understand the dynamics that lead to a number of coral pathologies. Perhaps the most concerning events are bleaching episodes, where entire reefscapes take on ghastly pale shades under rapidly changing environmental conditions. This increased interest in coral health has helped us hobbyists to understand similar problems within the confines of our aquaria; conversely, many aquarium experiments have helped scientists to understand the bleaching reef from a smaller scale. So, we know that corals can bleach, and we know that it's not a good thing. But can they recover? What is bleaching?…