Table of contents for October 2022 in Practical Fishkeeping

Consultant ecologist and fishkeeper of forty years, Colin is still finding new ways to spend money on fish. I WAS WHIZZING through a fish availability list one night, quickly scanning through the usual suspects, when a name popped out that I didn’t recognise — the mysterious ‘mouth almighty’, Glossamia aprion, stopped me in my tracks. With a name like that I thought it was going to be a catfish, or maybe a cichlid, but I was wrong on both counts. As it turns out, I was surprised to discover that this fish’s taxonomic placing will be more familiar to the marine fishkeepers amongst us, as mouth almighty is in the same family as the famous saltwater cardinalfish, Apogonidae. Being dubious, and having been caught out before with species listed as…

Mike is an industry professional, writer and photographer known primarily for his fieldwork with wild fisheries. IT’S NOT too often that something genuinely new, different, and completely unheard of appears out of the blue in the aquarium trade, at least not these days. So, when I first saw an image making the rounds on Facebook of an all-red pencilfish in a small handmade photo aquarium in Iquitos, Peru, I was immediately a bit skeptical. Surely something so colourful could not have been overlooked in the neighborhood of this city in the midst of the Peruvian Amazon, which has been exporting aquarium fish across the planet for well over half a century. While the region around Iquitos is incredibly biodiverse and new species do make their way into the trade with…

Tom runs the Freshwater Fishkeeping Facebook page and has a penchant for helping newcomers. INDIA IS known the world over for its diversity on all fronts; home to 121 different languages, and with so much flora and fauna that it would take a lifetime, to explore. It should come as no surprise therefore, that for us aquarists, the fish species calling this country their home are especially diverse. For this feature, I decided to focus on barbs, a family of fish that are often maligned, thanks to occasionally aggressive specimens such as tiger barbs, Puntigrus anchisporus, which have graced many a tank as a flippant purchase, only for them to become unpleasant towards their tankmates when kept in insufficent shoal sizes. There are always the calmer options; the cherry barb,…

TROPICAL Predatory cyprinids A Dutch aquarist and author with over 40 years of keeping experience, mainly with cichlids and west African fish. MANY OF you may be familiar with the predatory characins of South America, with genera such as Acestrorhynchus, Boulengerella or Exodon. But not so many aquarists will know that similar predatory species also live in comparable evolutionary corners in Africa. These belong to the Cyprinidae family, and they’re exciting fish that warrant a closer look. African predatory cyprinids are surprisingly numerous. In particular, three genera — all contained within the Chedrini tribe of the Danioninae subfamily — stand out: Leptocypris, Opsaridium and Raiamas. While all of these all are much more poorly represented in aquaria than their other danionin cousins, at least one of these genera makes occasional…

Director of Ornamental Aquatics Wholesale, Max is an avid fish house keeper and fish breeder. DID YOU KNOW? The species name tarzoo is a portmanteau of Tarpon Zoo, an ornamental fish farm company which owns a collecting station in Leticia, Colombia, from which the first specimens were exported. STEP INTO any internet forum and instantly you are greeted by the ‘non-conformers’, individuals who love to disagree with norms and perceived fact. It’s is a low risk/high reward method of online popularity harvesting and feigning expertise — the risks can be mitigated by talking about fish that most will never keep. One animal that crops up regularly in such conversations is the discus, Symphysodon spp. Discus are cichlids of the Heroini tribe, which contains virtually all Central American cichlids, as well…