My DAAS meeting Tonight May 23

[TwoTankAmin]

It will be a bit of an odd one for me, First, I have a portable, 75 gpd, 4 stage RO/DI unit I bought about a year ago. I only used about 11-12 gallons a week for my Altum angel tank. I sold the the fish about 6 months ago and no longer needed the unit. I had agreed to sell it to member of my club and should have brought it to last month's meeting for him. But I forgot it. I will bring it tonight. It means I will never get any fish that might need purer water to be able to keep them. I had always wanted to try licorice gouramis. Oh well.....

Next, tonight's speaker is doing a presentation on plecos. Over the past 24+ years I have kept about a dozen species/distinct varieties and L-number plecos. Pretty much all of which spawned in my tanks prolifically. I have been down sizing and have only one breeding pleco group remaining. I have have 13 super white of the "L236" variety of the recently described species Hyypancistrus seideli (which encomapassess L066, L236, L287, L333, L399 and L400 as being the same species).

All of the above just reminds me that a lot of the things I have really enjoyed doing for over 20 years now are ended or ending. *sigh*

 

[fishorama]

You have kept & bred many cool species & still have some, even some new species for your enjoyment. I wonder if you'll come home with fish tonight? It's been known to happen, lol. Maybe a few more cory oiapoquensis?

Have fun!

 

[Back in the fold]

All of the above just reminds me that a lot of the things I have really enjoyed doing for over 20 years now are ended or ending. *sigh*

I know exactly what you mean . Life can be a drag sometimes .

 

[TwoTankAmin]

You know me too well Ms. Fishorama. I came home with with 6 young Osteogaster aenea (bronze cory) and 6 young Inpaichthys kerri to add to my current group.

I sold 39 assassin snails and the ro/di unit went to the person who bred the 4 oiapoquensis I had bought. I am getting 6 more from him for only $30 at tge June meeting.. That will get me up to 10. I have a single large albino aenea, so the new 6 will make 7, I still have a lone black schultzei and a lone Hoplisoma sterbai plus only three long fin Hoplisoma paleatum. I am hoping to boost them al into groups of at least 10 each.

All of the corys will end up in planted communities. The one exception are the 10 Hoplisoma cw111. I am going to see if they might spawn for me.

Also, it turns out that I knew the speaker tonight. We have met at several weekend fish events.

 

[GaryE]

Age or illness can force us to scale back, and in some cases, make us stop fishkeeping before we feel we want to. I hope I can keep going as I get older, though maybe not at the level I'm at now.

A thing I've rediscovered is the fun you can have with common species. For a long time, I introduced rare fish to the hobby. I would keep them, learn about them, write about them and then replace them with something else there wasn't much info on. My fish had to be new discoveries worth writing about, and the challenges I created for myself had to be 'new'.

Now, I find keeping the old species of the hobby fun. I've never bred Hoplisoma paleatum (the salt and pepper/spotted Cory), or Hoplisoma panda. I'm raising panda fry now, and have a gaggle of paleatum that I really like. I enjoy black neons now as much as I did when I was a kid. Pristellas, and cardinals are still great, and I recently spotted some very old fashioned 'salt and pepper platys' in a store. I enjoyed them when I was 12, and I can see why. It's an old colour form that fell out of fashion, and 3 were there in a tank of the usual suspects. I brought home the trio, and I enjoy watching them.

I have my killies, but if I buy more, it won't be the latest discoveries. I look for ones I kept in the past and liked a lot, for their colour or for their uncooperative nature. I keep dwarf Cichlids, and other fish that appeal to me. Eventually, I will shut tanks and reduce, but I prefer to think of it as distilling. I've known a few fishkeepers who were still intrigued by their tanks when they were in their nineties.

So time consuming and high skill level fish like the Loracarids you've kept may be too much now, and there's no pleasure in what becomes a chore or an impossibility. But we spend years watching and admiring the adaptations of our fish, and there's a lesson there. If you choose to keep it going, the terms change, as they do when you have small kids, or an unstable job.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." Charles Darwin was right again there, and we may not be the strongest or fittest as we age, but we can use our brains and adapt.