DATZ South American Dwarf Cichlid Book

A few weeks ago, I came across this post on one of the cichlid forums, offering a dual language (English/German) version of a special DATZ publication on South American Dwarf Cichlids. I decided to contact the poster, Mike Wise, who consequently is the person who did the actual translation work from German to English, and is now selling copies of the book himself to folks in the United States.

This week, I received the book, and boy am I impressed. This doesn’t have the extensive information that the Cichlid Atlases have on each species, but as a simple photo log for hundreds of apistogramma or other dwarf species, with general locality information, it’s tremendous. Most species have multiple photographs, showing possible color morphs, and noting differences between different A-numbers currently attributed to the same species name. The book is organized sequentially by A-number, but the index is very comprehensive, listing both Latin and common names for fish, so they’re easy to lookup.

My only complaint for this book is that it doesn’t list pH or TDS information for each species. That said, I realize that this information is not necessarily available for every species, and even if it were, might fluctuate greatly depending on the wet/dry season.

All in all, this is a very dangerous book. It’s easy to flip through the pictures, and find some amazing species that you would like to try in your tank. I imagine many of these are hard or impossible to find unless you go collect them yourself, but it’s great to peruse nonetheless.

You can get a sample of some of the book’s pages here.