The Top Ten Reasons I loved the Aquarium Hobby in 2002

Another year has past, and the hobby has been just as enjoyable if not more so than last year...without further ado, my favorite exploits of the year:

10 = Vinegar Eels

As you spend more and more time in the hobby, the need for a fish food that is alive, small enough for your baby fry to eat, easy to raise, and inexpensive becomes a big need. I've spent years looking for better foods for the baby fish I raise as have most hobbyists I know. This year, I think the solution found me. Vinegar Eels are a great little animal that lives in vinegar...as long as you have a starter culture. They can be left alone for long periods of time without threatening your culture, and they are eaten ravenously by fry when seen.

A friend of mine got me going in Vinegar Eels, giving me a culture and explaining exactly how to keep them and then feed them to fish. I had so much fun with them and other small foods for small fish that I wrote an article about them!

9 = Rebuilt Fish Room

With money I got last year for Christmas I rebuilt one side of the fish room with a custom stand to hold 9 various sized aquariums. Building on what I felt was a success, this year I took money I got for my birthday and wood that was lying around and rebuilt another side of the fish room. This time though I went big. It holds 8 tanks, four 60 gallons and 4 20 gallon long aquariums. A very good mix of size and utility that has helped the fish I have grow out much faster.

I have no intent of rebuilding any other side of the room as I'm pretty happy with the way things are now. The room now houses 24 aquariums...and frankly, I cannot imagine trying to clean more than that many aquariums at one time! Still all the extra room has allowed me to raise a significant number of fish, not to mention how fun it is!

8 = Front Room Showcase

For the longest time I've been disappointed with the aquarium in my front room. Having 20+ aquariums downstairs that were for the most part fairly attractive, I always felt frustrated with the one upstairs, thinking it really wasn't as good looking as the majority of the aquariums I keep. Since it is the aquarium in the front room of the house, it seemed like it ought to be the most beautiful of all the aquariums I had...but it just never worked out that way.

Typically what I would do to an aquarium in this type of condition is to completely start over. Pull the fish, pull the plants, pull the gravel, etc. I would then completely redo the tank. Still, I hated to do that with this tank as the young plants I still hoped would grow out and produce something nice...so I added a single blue gourami. The fish was large and attractive, and immediately it became clear it was a natural fit for this semi-planted tank. So I purchased 4 gold gourami and the tank looked even better. But, it was still missing something. Come October, the club auction came and I took the opportunity to get 2 absolutely gorgeous bosemoni rainbows. That was the final trick. There are now several highly colorful fish in the aquarium, and the plants continue to grow. Not perfect by any means, but I'm satisfied with it now anyway!

7 = Julidochromis Dickfeldi

I actually got my pair of dickfeldi at an auction in October of 1999. I had long given up on them spawning when I noticed fry in my front room aquarium early this year. However, with 4 different loaches and a very large Synodontus catfish, the likelihood of the fry surviving was very low. So I quickly moved the parents over to a 25 long aquarium. There they produced 40+ little Julidochromis.

Along the way I've come to realize something. I've always thought that I liked the Julidochromis Kipili Reagoni best out of all the Julidochromis, but after keeping the dickfeldi in their own tank, I'm inclined to think that the dickfeldi is the best looking Julidochromis. The trick is that you have to keep this fish until it gets fully grown. At a small size they do show a little of the purple highlights that I think are so beautiful on the fish, but the black and white checkerboard on their fins, which is simply amazing, doesn't show up so starkly until the fish are at least a couple of years old.

The pictures below are the exact same fish! The one on the left is at 4 years, the one on the right at around 8 months. Both give you a hint of the purple on the dorsal fin, but the one on the left better shows how the coloration changes over time...though the flash took away the beauty of the dorsal fin on this fish when mature.

6 = Fish in the .Net

This fish site has seen a lot of changes this year. For one thing the name has changed. It is still located at the location of its origin, www.theaquarians.net, but you can also now get here by going to www.fishinthe.net. The idea behind it all was that it was too difficult for people to remember how to spell aquarian, and so people were getting lost trying to return to the site. So after a bit of brainstorming, we came up with Fish in the .Net. I then decided that a new name deserved a whole new look and so I've created the layout you now see...however it's been slow getting the whole website converted over to the new visuals, so look for 2003 to be a banner year for the website in the way things are done. I hope to make it easier to change all this info into the same formatting, and I hope to make the website easier to use for the community that uses it.

It's been a fun year doing the website. It's had its struggles as I try ever so desperately to keep up on all the updates that need to be made, but overall I've been very pleased with the progress. The site had back to back 100,000+ hit months to close out the year and all the increased traffic makes the website that much more rewarding as a webmaster. The site also serves to keep me interested in the hobby as I share and hear so many stories about fish-keeping from around the globe, and it has definitely been one of this years highlights.

5 - Guppy's & Genetics

One of the most influential club meetings on me this year was about genetics. I was expecting a sort of boring meeting, but instead I got something that sent my mind racing. The speaker, Don Dauggs, showed on the chalkboard how to breed your fish to create strains. Using the punet square, he illustrated the simple process. First figure out what ratio of fish you have from your fry. If you have 4 baby fish, and 3 look the same, but 1 has a different color, then you have one that you are working with. How do you figure that?

	X	x
X	XX	Xx
x	xX	xx

Ah yes, those days of High School science are returning. Why is this so important? Because it gives you some idea of how long it will take to get a pure-breeding strain of your new variation. If 1/4 of your fry (xx) come out looking different, they all you have to do is cross breed them as they are all recessive for the same gene...but if it is the more likely 1/64 of your fry that come out looking different, well then start working on your table to figure out how many genes are involved and you can start cross-breeding to try and solidify the genes you are looking at.

In addition to lots of math, the speaker came with a new guppy variety he had created. Dubbed the "double veil" this fish literally had two full veil tails. I bought the only pair he brought for a cool $18 and have since been raising the fry...but very slowly. Here is a fry, though still young, showing what will become a double-veil tail.

4 - Sunset Gourami

I've always found the gourami family to be one of the most interesting available. They are highly colorful and have very specialized breeding habits. I mean who else in the world builds a nest out of spit bubbles for their fry?

I spent a lot of time this year getting to know gourami better, and picked up some "sunset gourami" at a local PetSmart. This fish is really just a color morph of the thick-lipped gourami. Still they were a beautiful fish and they readily bred in my 60 gallon gourami breeding tank to my delight!

3 - Fish Books

With my re-found interest in gourami, I starting searching for good information about the fish. Unfortunately there isn't any. I looked for books and was unable to find anything I thought would give me good information about the fish. So when Heiko Blehr was in town speaking to the club, I asked him what a good book about gourami would be. He suggested Bettas, Gouramis and Other Anabantoids by Jorg Vierke (he also told me the book I had just ordered, all labyrinths by Aqualog was junk...which I greatly disagree with).

So I found a copy of the out of print book he suggested and ordered. I was pleasantly surprised by this little treasure of a book, and combined with my Aqualog book, has put me well on the road to better understanding gourami!

2 - Placidochromis Phenochilus

When I first saw a fully grown specimen of this species I could not believe my eyes. I have dubbed it the "Impressionist cichlid" as it looked just like an impressionist painting. The fish is splotched with various colors of blue that blend together without start or beginning to produce a virtual tapestry of beauty.

Unfortunately this fish is VERY skittish, so the best photo I have is not very good. It certainly doesn't give you a full understanding of how amazing this fish looks. After seeing the fish last year I wanted some...but no-one carried them and the person who had the pair I was photographing had no luck breeding them and so gave them to another hobbyist. Thankfully that hobbyist had good luck and so he gave 30+ of the fry back to the original owner. I bought my 4 at $8 a piece. They were just starting to color up into the magnificent fish fish they are still becoming.

What was more to my joy when I got this fish to breed and was able to spit the young! I now have 35 very young fry growing up in my aquarium and hope to have more...and the adults aren't anywhere close to full-grown yet. The fish in the photo was roughly 8 inches long. My adults are just barely 4 inches long, so there is a lot of fun yet to come!

1 - The Black Paradise Fish

Having read so much about gourami, I set out on a quest to find a beautiful gourami that I'd only seen in photos: The Black Paradise fish. Paradise fish are none to be bruisers, so I was concerned about what I might be getting into, but I figured if I could find and raise some of them, then I would be involved in a great undertaking.

As fate would have it, I found a group on aquabid and bought them. I received 5 semi-mature specimens in the mail and have since been raising them to maturity. My only concern as they have gotten larger is that I might have gotten 5 males! But even if that were the case, this fish has been an ultimate pleasure to keep. It is a beautiful un appreciated gem among many!

Conclusion

2002 was a great year for fish and for me! I already have a long list of things that I'm going to try and do next year and I'm ever excited about the possibilities of where this website may be.