X-Original-To: jbholmes@nwlink.com
Delivered-To: jbholmes.nwlink.com@mx7.pacifier.net
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 12:41:11 -0800
From: "Betty Goetz" <Betty.Goetz@noaa.gov>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2)
Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
To: jbholmes@nwlink.com
Subject: update on Endler's
Way way back in October of last year you shared 3 pairs (+ one juvenile
which ended up female) of Endler's livebearers (and lots of live plants!)
with me. I just wanted to update you on their progress and thank you
again! After an acidosis scare (which I attribute to the dead
brown-looking mailorder java moss the vendor promised me would green-up
with patience...pH of 6.8) and the loss of all my males plus one female, I
figured out how to keep the pH and hardness at a level the fish like. I
also learned a lesson about complacency....the pH in this tank had seemed
so stable at 7.0-7.2 I got lazy and didn't do my testing much less water
changes often enough. Some experimentation with crushed coral and parakeet
cuttlebones helped (weak grin). Plus dredging out all that dead looking
brown stuff and tossing it in the garbage (my patience only goes so far
when dead fish are involved...I don't think that java moss was EVER going
to green up!). Once I got the pH back up to 7.2 or so, everyone was much
happier! And all the females were pregnant and started popping out babies
so I thought I was home-free. One month went by and then
another....everything looked female. I was getting nervous. Then, one day
I started seeing little black slashes on the sides of 2 of the younger
'females'. To date, I've got 5 males which are vividly showing their
orange racing stripes....and have roughly 20 Endler's going strong. It's
time to start sharing my Endler's with others. And I do have a line
forming to the right....between all these fish-keeping co-workers, these
Endler's will start dispersing soon. Thanks again!
AND...hopefully I'll be picking up some wild-type honey gouramis this
Friday! Blue Sierra in Issaquah says they showed up on the wholesale list
so they ordered me some. Fingers crossed! I have a 10g tank all planted
and waiting for them....but the female Apistogramma (double-red aggi) we
call JAWS has to move to the 6gal Eclipse I just set up today. Can't have
her killing my lovely little gouramis like she does everything else. She's
called JAWS cuz her main function is consumption of the wild-type guppy
fry my 29g tank produces (about 90+ per month). You can almost hear the
Jaws movie theme as she lurks under the hornwort before targeting a
newborn guppy (wink).
Now....I'm getting pretty sucked into this aquarium thing again so just
printed out the membership form to the Greater Seattle group. Am I gonna
be a joiner again (sigh)??
-----
Betty Goetz - Research Fishery Biologist
Team Leader:Bering Sea pollock/rockfish
Age & Growth Task
Resource Ecology & Fisheries Management Division
Alaska Fisheries Science Center, NMFS, NOAA
P.O. Box 15700
Seattle, Washington 98115-0070
(206) 526-4217