Almost Done

[TwoTankAmin]

Last Friday I sold 143 plecos. Since I began my planned retirement from the hobby I have sold all of my breeders save the WC 173. I also have about 30+ F1s as well.

My 3 oldest zebra plecos are going to a retirement tank in CA to live out the balance of their lives. The 8 assorted offspring I should have will be at sellable size by the summer. When they go out it will be the firs time in about 22 years that I will not have a single zebra pleco.

I am negotiating to sell all my remaining RB 236 offspring. My tank of mixed Hypans, my Altums and all my clowns and redline barbs. I am also negotiating to sell the remaining dozen L173 from the tank raised breeders which were the first breeding group to go.

From 20 tanks I will be down to 8 and 6 of them are planted communities. They will be consolidated some over the coming months as they range in size from 5.5 to a 75. I am keeping the in-wall tanks (the 75 and a 30B). They will likely be the final 2 when I reach a point of having 0.

I will have some corys and likely a few young ancistrus (but no breeding allowed). And I recently got 3 dwarf hoplos all male at my clubs monthly auction.

I am not happy about all of this. But nothing lasts forever. Age is a cruel master.

[bekateen]

Thanks for the update TTA. You've done a wonderful job over the years curating your lines, not allowing hybrids to spread as real fish, etc. You've been a resource for so many hobbyists.

When things are working, you want to keep going, but yeah, age has its way, no matter what. Good luck with the scale-down. I hope you find a comfortable peace with it.

Cheers, Eric

[Jools]

Yes, what Eric said indeed. You've been a longtime companion on PlanetCatfish's journey too. I hope that doesn't end quite as soon as your fishkeeping endeavours and the few tanks you are reducing to sound fun.

Cheers,

Jools

[Shane]

I agree. Cut down on tanks, but not your activities for the hobby. Too much knowledge would be lost.
-Shane

[aquaholic]

A yearly admission ticket to your favourite freshwater public aquarium(s) may help? Many are well set up for impaired mobility access. I am able to chat with the curator and often invited behind the scenes at mine.

Or perhaps use a competent aquarium maintenance company to look after what tanks you want to keep?

In my case, I've been setting up larger and larger tanks with automated and self cleaning filters, water change, redundant systems. Not 100% sure if successful yet but I'm getting prepared for the future.

[TwoTankAmin]

MY problem has been the house itself. My brother and I , two old bachelors, share a lovely house we inherited. Out parents built it in 1961 as a summer and weekend place. It is in the woods and has its own private well which is mostly why I have done so well with plecos. But the house has no basement and is not huge. There are two buildings though.

My fish tanks are in both buildings and 4 different rooms. In the summer I have set up temporary tanks which come down in the fall. So, I have no fish room. Ramping up over the years meant every tank had its own heaters, filters etc. Over the last decade I began migrating in two rooms to central air power for the most part. I mostly also duplicated pumps, hoses buckets etc so I had them in both buildings.

And that is what made it hard to keep up now. But I do have a bit of good news. I kept my WC 173 tank and a grow tank with a bunch of their kids. I had a tank disaster in the breeding tank last year due to it getting way overstocked. I lost over 75 fish including one of the breeders. I feared that the surviving 9 breeders and a dozen assorted sized offspring that also survived.

But I was afraid that those survivors might no longer be able to breed as a result of being exposed to insane ammonia etc. levels. I felt I could not sell any of these fish if my fears were realized. So, I decided to keep the fish until I could feel good about whichever way things worked out.

I had a couple of spawns a few months back- I saw eggs in one cave and wigglers in another. Some time later they were no longer there. I did bot know if they survived and were in the tank or had died being more casualties of the disaster. I did spot a single 1 inch fry recently but that was it. Last week I was doing maint. and water changes on the tank and I spotted two 1/2 inch fry. So, maybe things are actually OK.

I know that having WC 173 is not a common thing. I was lucky to be offered the chance to buy by their owner and could not refuse. I have always considered having these fish was a responsibility. So, I am overjoyed to see that are not all sterile.

I plan to maintain them and a grow tank for them for a while longer. In the not to distant future I will pull the tank apart to get a head count. The best part is my main pleco space is set up such that the two tanks I will keep are pretty easy to manage. I can drain them directly into the utility sink and can even refill them directly from my tap.

But I have no illusions as to how long I can keep up with this. I am thinking maybe one more year or so since there will only be two more tanks than originally planned. I will have to replace the central air pump with a smaller one as I only need 8 outlets.

What is that old saying? "No rest for the weary."

[DBam]

I really appreciate getting to read about other people's experiences in the deeper places of the hobby. Hearing you say you felt a responsibility to raise rare fish stuck out as particularly interesting. As much as there is disappointment to hear you're reducing your hobby, it's understandable. Your experience makes me wonder what kind of perspective it has given you; what kinds of things were major turning points in your hobby, what things brought you deeper into it, those kinds of things.

[TwoTankAmin]

I have thought about what Dbam wrote above for some time now. I just sold off the last of my RB 236 offspring as well as my tank of "mystery" hypans (I had no clue what species they were and it was several not just one.) I now have two zebra fry and my WC 173 and offspring left. They will all be gone in the next year.

I can say this about my journey as a fish keeper. When I was setting up my first tank I had a set of rules. Two of these were that I did not want any of those ugly fish that I saw stuck to things with their mouth. This was an ignorant choice. I did get one thing right by accident. I did not want to spawn anything, but I also felt that is was important to have both sexes for any fish I would keep.

Like all of us who first enter the hobby, I was pretty ignorant. This was especially true when it came to water parameters. What I did know wast that I had decent water from our well. I have never needed to use dechlor. What I did not know was that my water would be pretty ideal for spawning a lot of the species who were from softer water.

My first pleco to spawn were my LF bristlenose, I did not even know this was happening as it was a community tank and the fry were on the menu. That is until one day I actually spotted a tiny ancistrus on a leaf. A breeder from whom I had been buying corys convinced me to pull a cave with a dad and eggs and hatch them. Who knew I was heading down a path I never anticipated.

One other factor contributed a lot toward where I am today, That was the Baensch Aquarium Atlas. It had in depth information and pictures of a lot of fish. I would spend hours going through the pages and spotting really neat looking fish I thought I would like to keep. But further reading usually ruled out the species because it needed different parameters, got to big for my tanks or did not play well with others.

But, as I found fish that would work in my tanks and water parameters. I made up a wish list. The top of that list contained zebra pleco and Beta Imbellis. I eventually got both species. I managed to buy my first serious plecos for breeding when I was given the chance to buy a breeding colony of 13 zebras and a number of their offspring. I had to break into my IRA to get them. Considering what I had spent I was extremely nervous about it all.

About two weeks after I brought the zebra group home I got my first spawn from the Alpha. Two weeks later the number 2 male spawned. This pair of males continued to give me a spawn every two weeks for the next 7+ months. Then they went on hiatus for about 3.5 months and the whole thing resumed.

The thing about this all was it was not me who was responsible for this betond two factors. The first was the parameters of my well water. I had nothing to do with this, it was just luck. In fact, I used to tell people that my well water contained a natural fish aphrodisiac. The second was my dedication to doing good tank maintenance and for feeding quality food. This meant a lot of frozen as I did not make the jump to live which I knew was the best.

Over the years I came to believe the following. Fish naturally want to spawn. Many of them will do so as long as we do not do things which might discourage or even prevent spawning. Water parameters matter but most of us live with whatever come out of our taps. Mine were ideal for a lot of softer water species. Next, the layout of the environment we provide also matters a lot. We will not succeed in spawning plecos in a bare bottom tank with just a few caves, they need a lot of hiding places for a number of reasons.

I also learned early on that, for me, the best thing was to do only species tanks. I think that was a good decision for the Hypans I kept. The next thing I learned was it paid to observe my fish. With the zebras this meant I learned that the alpha male is not usually the biggest. Rather it is the toughest. So my biggest was the number 2 in the pecking order. I realized that lots of cover was beneficial. Zebras and other smaller plecos often need to hide out of view of rivals etc. So my tanks became set-up so there was a ton of cover available to the fish, but a lot more work for me when I needed to catch them.

But here is what I consider to be the most important thing I learned over the years. Nature is a lot smarter than I am when it came to working with the plecos I have. Nature gives fish certain traits over time. One of the more important goals is the preservation of a species via reproduction. To this end nature has given the fish the ability to figure out two things. The first is the best spot in the tank where i have p;aced a lot of caves is not something I can figure out, But my fish can. If I gave them a number of options, the alpha male was going to end up the best location.

Next, nature also wants offspring to be the strongest and healthiest. This means the top males should spawn with the top females. This would make it most likely to produce the strongest/best offspring. Again, I am not able to decide whop should spawn with whom, but the fish know this. So, I preferred to work with the fish in groups rather than to usurp the decision making process by selecting a pair or reverse trio and spawning them in this configuration. That would basically be me replacing nature by choosing who would spawn with whom.

Of course, the commercial fish breeding outfits are usually geared towards a maximum output.

Over the years I believe I have been able to observe a number of things in terms of my fish. Some of the lessons have not been easy on me or the fish. A perfect example was my early success with zebras. I began to think I had some special skills in terms of getting my fish to breed. And that made me lazy. It is a lot easier to feed commercial sinking sticks than live, or frozen and especially Repashy. I feed this in smaller pieces which I spread all over a tank. My thinking is their are fewer food fights or fish that get nothing when I feed this way. But it is more work for me.

Thankfully CatCon (their pleco breeding seminar) and Ingo Seidel and Dale Ernst showed me where I went wrong and why diet matters. In fact, our choice of what to feed our fish has a great deal to do with there ability and desire to spawn.

Unfortunately, age slows us all down sooner or later. I have reached the point where I cannot keep up with all the tanks any longer. It is not right for me to keep fish for whom I cannot give the proper care they need. So, I have been selling them all to others who, hopefully, will go on to spawn them. I am a sucker for the B&W Hypancistrus for the Big Bend of the Rio Xingu. So they were the one I chose to keep. Also, the fact that they are endangered or became so mattered.

When I was breeding the zebras in 2006, I knew they might no last in the wild due to the damming of the river. I was not sure of this but I felt is was likely. If one is to believe what Leandro Sousa has said, the zebra population in the wild is now on the edge. If too many more are lost, there is the risk the population will not survive. But since I got my first spawn there have been several large scale breeding operations which are pumping out zebras in large numbers. So, even if this species does not survive in the wild, it should live on in aquariums across the world.

I do have one last confession to make. Rare means more expensive. While my goal was never been to make a ton of money, I have always wanted to get my investment back and to pay for my overall hobby costs. Close to half of my tanks have been planted communities. I learned from the bristlesnose that getting many spawns of large size of inexpensive fish was more of a problem than a blessing. I always lost money and time rehoming them and the cost involved was negative to me.

One box of zebra offspring brought me more income than many bristlenose. Plus. I was working to get my offspring into the hands of people who wanted to spawn them if they could. The other part of this was the sale of the zebra kids got me the money I need to get the next species. I never could have imagined I would have to pay $1,000 a fish for wild caught 173s. As far as I knew they were not removed from Brazil after the export regulations were put into effect.

One last observation here. From the first time I spotted a tiny swordtail fry looking up at me through the floating plants, I reflexively learned to do the "happy fish dance." Little did I realize that it would be just as excited when I heard back from a buyer that the fish I sent them had spawned. It also made me do the happy fish dance.

I am not an expert on catfish by any means. I know what I do about a limited number of species specifically but not a lot about catfish in general. I have always kept corys, but once bitten by the pleco bug, I stopped working with the corys. I have also been lucky to have many of the fish I have kept spawn. I credit my water and feeding good food. I am more lucky than skilled for sure. But I do not care since it resulted in fry. I hope those who have gotten my fish have enjoyed them as much as I have.

Sorry for the long post, but somebody sort of asked.

[bekateen]

Very nice history you have there TT. Thanks for sharing.

Until we meet again, Cheers,
Eric