thank you for witnessing me leaving the lurking mode.
I'm Kati, 28, living in Vantaa, Finland with my boyfriend, three cats (I mean real cats, the furry & purry kind
) and way too much fish for a sane person or even two but luckily there are none of those around. We're keeping quite a few catfishes (catfish all-sorts... around 15 species of cories, some loricariids (plecos and whiptails), driftwood cats and doradids as well as some Hara hara, whose family I will never remember), a few species of loaches and cichlids and two spotted spiny eels who are both called "The Nose". I'm very much into breeding fish (esp. catfish but others as well). We have quite a few tanks for this purpose in our house, and some day I'm going to have a fish room in the basement just for making more baby fish
. We have so far successfully raised several batches of some Corydoras species (C. aeneus, C. davidsandsi, C. paleatus and C. sterbai), an unidentified wild Otocinclus sp., Pseudohemiodon platycephalus, an Ancistrus sp., Pangio kuhlii, some rainbowfishes (Melanotaenia praecox and M. lacustris, Bedotia geayi) and some dwarf cichlids (Apistogramma viejita, Laetacara dorsigera, Microgeophagus altispinosa and Pelvicachromis pulcher).
Our current projects include raising some Ancistrus, Pseudohemiodon and Corydoras fry as well as trying to get wild Corydoras aeneus "Peru gold", Farlowella sp and Platydoras costatus to spawn. The Farlowella have spawned before, but we didn't manage to keep the fry alive for more than a month or so. Probably a feeding thing.
About the Platydoras... I know this species hasn't been spawned in captivity without hormone injections, but it still seems worth a shot since I think I managed to get my hands on an actual pair. I hear their previous owner had seen them spawn spontaneously, but I haven't been able to contact him yet to make sure and ask for details. Any ideas would be most helpful since there seems to be no info about their reproduction whatsoever and very little info about their natural habitats.
This may get this post censored, but an other on-going project is setting up a Malawi cichlid tank ("I want those blue fish!" - Pseudotropheus demasoni
). The next thing I'm going to do after finishing this post is go look for information on Chiloglanis sp. catfish and Aethiomastacembelus sp. eel also found in Malawi. Looking forward to sparkling catfish conversation with everyone!
Rgds,
Kati
