photos & H20 conditions

[wrisch@mendel.berkeley.edu]

Hello everyone,

Finally, I've gotten more mail from the apisto list than the killie
one (which I should unsubscribe to - all I could tell them is how to
make little killie chips by using them as dither fish for West Africans).

Simon asked me about where he can find picures of A. "pandurini",
A. pasciquamis, A. piauiensis, A. "4-stripe". All but the pandurini should
be in there (the Aqualog). It's probably my fault you can't find them,
due to my lousy spelling. Actually, I think the book misspelled piauiensis as
'piauensis', and I know there are two photos. If you still can't find
them, I'll just tell you the page nos. tomorrow.

Mike asked me about my water parameters for spawning apistos. Where I live
the water is pretty close to neutral pH and ranges from 150-180 ppm, but
I use a Deionizing unit to bring the hardness to as close to 10 ppm as
I can get it (I'm also recharging the damn resin practically every
week).

And yes, I do try to shoot for a pH of about 5.5-6.0. But I am known to
be just a bit compulsive. I always add Tetra Blackwater to my water for
changes, and I was using Kent pH Down (sulphuric acid, if I recall) and/or
Discus buffer (but I hate the phosphates) if the pH was still too high.

Lately, however, I have been just adding the Blackwater straight to the
DI water and using that. The reason for this is that a friend of mine (who
is a great fishkeepe) was just adding peat extract to H20 straight from
a de-humidifier for her West Africans, and they seemed
to be thriving.

Occassionally I get paranoid and add tap water until my DI water is at
10 - 20 ppm.  I sometimes worry (erroneously?) that there may be minerals
that the fish do require in trace amounts. What do you think?

I am monitoring my tanks carefully because I am worried that with no
buffering capacity the pH could shoot down on me. I do weekly water
changes (25%) on most of my fish, though, and I think this helps keep the pH
more stable.

(As an aside - the above friend claims her A. norberti wouldn't spawn
until I told her to do weekly H20 changes. I don't remember doing this.
Nonetheless, for those of you who are having spawning
trouble, pick up on those water changes!)

Regarding temperature, for now-obvious reasons I try to keep my tanks at
26 C. In case anyone's interested, the reference for Uwe Romer's paper is:
U. Romer & W. Beisenherz.(1996) Enviornmental determination of sex in
Apistogramma(Cichlidae) and two other freshwater fishes (Teleostei).
Journal of Fish Biology 48:714-725.
The paper's easy to follow, too.


Lisa the loquacious