The Capital Cichlid Association was back after their summer break on Saturday with a huge meeting, featuring Dick Au, author and expert on discus. With many cichlid-o-philes from all

over the east coast region attending, there were at least 84 people in attendance. This month also had the largest auction I’ve ever seen at one of their meetings.

Dick Au gave a fantastic talk, dumbing down the basics of keeping Discus, so that I left that meeting feeling like they might not be as much trouble as their reputation suggests. He went through the entire lifecycle of how to choose your discus, who to buy them from, how to keep them, breed them, raise the fry, and so on. He stressed that the most important thing whenever keeping discus is to make sure you get quality discus from the start, otherwise, you’re just asking for trouble down the line. He suggested avoiding chain or general purpose pet stores, but fish stores who maintain significant stock of discus year-round should be okay because they need to know how to care for them to keep their stock healthy.

Even so, he suggests that you always ask the store owner to feed them in the store before buying, so that you can make sure they have a good apetite. Without that, there’s likely something wrong with them. Of course, breeders of discus who maintain quality strains  are great sources as well.

One of the things that he mentioned which surprised me was that he didn’t neccessarily recommend keeping them in planted tanks. Not that it can’t be done well, but he said it’s much harder to maintain proper water quality without being able to vacuum up uneaten food, like you can in a bare-bottom tank.

That said, Dick did mention that discus have been raised in captivity long enough that most are quite adaptable to a wide range of water conditions, contrary to their wild counterparts. As long as your water doesn’t have significantly high pH, he recommends using tap water for water changes, verses mixing your own RO water because he believes the water conditions stay more stable that way. Additionally, while temperatures between 80 and 84 degrees are ideal, most discus will do just fine in slightly lower or slight warmer temps. This is good if you do want to keep them with plants. He discused far many more topics, but most of them are covered in detail in his two books.

Overall, this was a fantastic meeting!

April’s CCA meeting featured Dan Woodland from the Ohio Cichlid Association, speaking about his experience setting up a Low Cost, High Tech Fish Room. Dan also chronicled many of his fish collecting experiences all over the world, and gave us a virtual tour (via powerpoint) of his fish room, introducing many of the species he keeps.

Like many hobbyists, Dan started his “fish room” in an adhoc nature, adding equipment as needed, and eventually ending up with an unwieldy set of tanks, wires, lights, etc… When he decided to add an addition to his house, he instantly had an empty basement room to build his fish room. With the luxury of building a brand new fish room from scratch, Dan made sure that the cinder block walls were fully sealed, drains were pre-planned, electricity sources were adequate, and the water supply was sufficient.

With the basic room intact, everything from filtration to climate control needed to be sorted out. Being an avid collector, Dan decided to isolate every tank using a dedicated canister filter, in order to avoid introducing a wild disease into his entire system. The room is heated to about 74 degrees, which has the effect of keeping the tanks a bit cooler, but the benefits of that are that the fish grow slower, requiring less food, and more importantly, the fish room is pleasant to work in.

His water supply was setup to automatically condition and change out the water, doing small water changes twice daily. Using an ion exchanger, Dan removes heavy metals from his water, and an RO filter produces soft water for some tanks, while extruding harder waste water which he uses for his African cichlid tanks. A mechanical thermostatic mixing valve mixes his hot and cold water lines, producing water that is the proper 72-78 degrees for his tanks. To feed water into the tanks, he uses pressure compensating drippers used in irrigation to guarantee a constant GPH output, regardless of the input water pressure. This means that for each tank, he can directly control how much water is changed each day, dependent on the size of the tank.

While the title of this talk included the “low cost” slogan, I believe that is probably relative to other more elaborate fish rooms that some hobbyists have. Although, Dan did not give a final cost, he did say that his entire fish room was built using proceeds from selling fish he had raised. I presume that the cost of his home additions was not included in this amount, however. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to see how other folks manage to maintain large numbers of tanks, and what effort goes into setting that up.

On Saturday, I attended the Capital Cichlid Association’s March meeting. The speaker for this month’s meeting was CCA member, Ron Nielson, who gave a presentation on the “Conservation of Malagasy Cichlids,” which is the precursor for the same talk he will be giving at the American Cichlid Association’s yearly convention in Atlanta, GA later this year.

Since Ron will be giving a very similar talk at the ACA convention, I don’t want to post many specifics about his presentation. I will say that it was quite interesting because prior to the meeting, I could not name a single cichlid from Madagascar. Many of these fish are on the endangered species list, or not far from it due to the terrible loss of habitat in the country. Introduction of food fish to the rivers have further threatened the native species.

For this reason, it’s great that Ron and others are doing their best to stimulate interest in this group of fish, and provide details about how to successfully keep and breed them in our aquariums. Most of the available cichlids (various Paratilapia, Ptychochromis, and Paretroplus) require large tanks to keep, but Ron has managed to keep some of them happily in much smaller quarters than conventional wisdom suggests.

I don’t know if I am going to be able to make it to the ACA convention this year, but for anyone that does, you definitely don’t want to miss Ron’s presentation. I promise you’ll learn something! For those that can’t, you can visit Ron’s website at http://fishpost.com to learn more about these great fish.

Additionally, CCA announced that later this summer they’re hoping to host a swap meet in the area, which will allow all of the local clubs, vendors, etc to setup tables to sell items. Any hobbyist looking to obtain plants or fish that are otherwise hard to come by, this will be the place to do it. The date will most likely be July 13th, but that’s still somewhat up in the air.

The Capital Cichlid Association opened the year by bringing in Julie from FryBabies.com to talk about keeping, and breeding, Tropheus cichlids from Lake Tanganyika.

Tropheus are a mouth-brooding cichlid that are fairly common among African cichlid keepers. I, myself, have never kept them, so I found Julie’s talk quite interesting. She imports a lot of fish, making it unpractical to slowly acclimate new imports to her water. So, presuming the pH of the two waters is not terribly different, she simply nets them from the bag, and puts them in her tank. While this may sound alarming, she indicates that she has had zero deaths resulting for this treatment, which is not true for when she slowly acclimated them.

Once in the tank, she withholds feeding them for 3 days to allow their gut to clear of any previous food. Then, watching for some trouble signs (stringy feces), she gradually increases the amount of food she gives them — mostly vegetable-based foods.

Her tanks are generally 50-75G, and she sets them up using rocks/wood to obscure long lines of sight. This helps to lower the aggression level of the males to one another. In addition, she usually stocks at least 20 fish per tank so that no one male beats up on the other fish. The idea is that with that many fish, the aggression will be spread out evenly, resulting in few if any deaths.

When the Tropheus breed, she usually doesn’t strip the eggs from the mouths of the female. In most cases, she allows the parents to raise the fry themselves until the fry are about 1/2″-3/4″ in length. However, if Julie does end up extracting the eggs, she usually waits about 2 weeks until heads and tails are developed and visible in the egg. She has observed that if she does it before this time, the number of fry surviving the move to their own tank decreases. To extract the eggs, she fills an airline tube with water, inserts it into the female’s mouth, and holding the fish upside down, blows on the opposite end of the tube to force water into the female’s mouth. The female usually releases the eggs, but 2-3 tries may be needed to get all of them. A CCA member noted that it’s also possible to just move the female to a small tank of her own, and she’ll usually get stressed, dropping the eggs.

Julie rarely feeds any live foods to her Tropheus, but if she does, she’s sure to follow that feeding with a heavy veggie meal to help push the meat through the fish’s gut. Failure to do this can cause fatal problems with Tropheus due to the length of their intestines, so it’s probably best to stick to a vegetarian diet. Multiple species of Tropheus can be kept in the same tank, but make sure they are different color forms. Even so, if you plan on selling the fry, it’s best to keep each species in their own aquarium. You can, however, keep other types of fish, such as Petrochromis, catfish, and gobies with Tropheus, as long as you ensure that the habitat of the aquarium is appropriate for all species involved.

All-in-all an interesting talk from someone who’s bred her fair share of Tropheus!

Aquafest 2007 was much more than just a set of lectures. In addition to being a fun, social event, CCA also hosted a fish show, showcasing over 100 top-quality fish from around the area. As you can see below, there was no lack of tanks. Cichlids seemed to be the most prominent type of fish on display with discus the size of dinner plates, gorgeous Africans, and even a few apistogramma making appearances. There were also a number of catfish showing.

In addition to the fish show, Ray “Kingfish” Lucas had a number of displays setup, touting products from a number of great aquarium-related manufacturers. Tony Orso was also setup, with a few other vendors, such as Anubias Design, at the festival.

Besides introducing Eric Do, GWAPA’s big event of the weekend was the aquascaping demonstration, led by myself and recent APC tank-of-the-month winner, Jeff U (bigstick120). Aaron T, Dave W., and Eric Do also helped field questions while we were presenting.

We gave a pretty straight forward aquascaping demonstration, trying to mimic Amano’s demonstration at the 2004 AGA convention that GWAPA hosted. Jeff added some brand new Seachem Flourite Black to our 37G Oceanic tank, and began setting up the hardscape. I did my best to explain that you often want to group rocks into odd numbered groupings, and avoid symmetry when possible.

Once the hardscape was in place, Jeff and I started planting HC in the foreground, along with some Blyxa japonica, anubias barteri var. ‘nana‘ and downoi in the midground.

We explained how you want to plant the tank mostly dry, with just enough water to compact the substrate for easier planting. After planting all of stems it was time to fill up the tank.

Eric Do helped out with the chore of filling up the tank, using the empty Flourite Black bag as a shield to disturb the substrate as little as possible. (I mentioned yesterday how Eric is a great guy, right?) I continued planting, and also added some Java moss to the branches of the manzanita.

Finally, with the help of a H.O.T. magnum micron filter, the water cleared, and we were left with the aquascape below. It didn’t come perfectly, but it was enough to inspire plenty of questions from the folks attending. This entire setup was raffled off the next day, with lucky winner Rodney C., winning the raffle.

The auction itself was a HUGE event. Registration started around 9:00am. All items were auctioned off by 7:45pm. Yes, the auction ran non-stop from 10:00am to 7:45pm, selling at least2000 individual items by my estimate. Some club members believe that it may be the largest aquarium auction ever in the history of the three clubs participating. If you missed it, you missed an opportunity to grab anything from books, tanks, equipment, fish, plants, invertebrates, substrate, etc. at great prices.

I didn’t come away empty-handed, either. I won the following:

Fish:
Nannochromis nudiceps
Ancistrus sp. L279 “Huaco Mayo”
Corydoras Paleatus

Plants:
Crypt. wendtii “Dewitt”
Anubias sp. “Gasser”
Anubias barteri var. ‘nana eyes’

I’ll post more about where all of those things went later this week.