not in the least because i strongly believe that the crux of this basket is why almost any cichlid can be bred in captivity and almost all catfish are tough as nails when it comes to hacking the code.
it boils down to this:
WHY do we change the biotope of our riverine fish into something as unchanging and stable as a Malawi tank?
we keep our riverine fish at the same temperature all year long
we do the same with pH, hardiness, KH for those who like to muck about with carbondioxide and perhaps add oakleaves or beech.
but we do NOT, or rarely (only hardcore nutters go for it) swing with the seasons, apart from the occasional cool-water change to kickstart the ol' fat female Corydoras species into spawning mode.
apart from fish that can be found smack on the equator (a lot of Amazonian fish) or Riftlake fish (Malawi, Tanganyika) the environment of our tropical fish makes huge changes every single year!
once the Monsoon comes, a river in Mexico (they don't call it 'Monsoon', but my Spanish doesn't exist) drops it's hardiness by more than half, likely by over 4/5th; the temperature goes down from 30 to 19'C and the oxygen levels go through the roof.
and in that rainy season it often rains several times a day.
buckets
really pissing down.
from what I remember when I was in the tropics, in the Wet it often rains in the morning, clears a bit around noon, starts to get truly torrential after that and clears out just before dusk.
imagine imitating that on a small scale by simply hooking an extra powerhead to a timer and imitating the influx of oxygen in the morhing and the afternoon
or keeping a record and turning up the heater in summer, softening the water in september and dropping the temperature in oktober; but slowing waterchanges in februari and adding beech leaves in april, working around to the hot mineral- and rotten leaf-rich waters in auguast.
just before we start doing our home Moonsoon season!
instead, we keep our tropical riverines like a bogwood version of a Tropheus tank
me thinks we're on the wrongf track here and I blame it on stubbornly following outdated books all written down in the 1950's and 95% of all fishy literature is just a lot of copyright violations from then on.
it is any surprise that -for example!- Rift lake Syno's are bred by the millions?
grandiops, multipunctatus, Polli White, lucipinnis, petricola, poplli and even granulosus have been bred, all without using hormones.
but riverine Syno's haven't been bred without needles except for a few very rare instances, beginning with Harold Pinters' sole success breeding the nigriventris a single time over 40 year ago.
we have the knowledge:
we can get weather reports from Mexico to Bolivia, from Indonesia to Cameroon.
it's all there, on the web.
we know how to change the temperature (dead easy), oxygen (powerheads, diffusors, airstones, wet/dry filtration), the hardiness and acidity, the list goes on.
heck, we can even get the lengths of day and switch the timers on to the TRUE daylengths of our Peruvian L number collection.
and it's all sooooo simple
no, we don't need to change our Mexican fish tank into a mudflood. and we don't have to drop the temperature from 31'C to 18'C in 15 minutes.
but we DO need to take a good look omn our hobby
scratch ourselves behind the ears at all those "unbreedable" catfish species
and add the long term thinking
instead of turning all fishtanks worldwide into rainforest versions of a Riftlake set up where nothing changes
(I'm generalizing, I'm an old Tanganyika nut and in the Rift seasons count too, but subtle)
we can re invent fishkeeping if we ditch those old books, if we stop flogging all those dead horses and take the first step into finding the Reasons behind the Seasons
we might hack quite a few codes
anyone ever bred Rhamdia's without a needle? or Pseudomystus siamensis?
show me your thoughts about this; how would YOU put in "year-thinking" in your hobby, instead of "week-thinking" until the next regular waterchange?
;)
