apisto life spans

[wrisch@uclink4.berkeley.edu (Lisa Wrischnik)]

Hi all,
I would like to know what people consider to be the sure signs of old
age in their fish.  I just lost one of my original Taeniacara candidi males
(at about 2 yrs of age), who over the course of a couple of months began to
lose his color,to eat less, andn then to develop a spine bend. The other
fish in this
tank are all fine.  Anyway, I was wondering if fish that die of "old age"
really just become too stressed to fend off common diseases and so die, or
if they
succumb to diseases of old age (a cancer, for example).  Any ideas - or do
I really just have some awful disease lurking around in this tank?

As a corollary, what kinds of life spans have you all seen for your dwarfs?
(I couldn't access the archives today to see if this has been extensively
covered already, so apologies if it has). I think I manage to kill off most
of mine before they get the chance to go gently into that good night.

Lisa