Tropical Fish

Common names/s: Red-finned Shark, Rainbow Shark, Ruby Shark tropical fish.

Scientific name: Epalzeorhynchus frenatus.

Family: Cyprinidae.

Origin: S.E. Asia (Thailand)

Maximum size: 6" (15cm)

Care: Planted tank with plenty of rocks, wood and caves. At least 36" in length. Keep the water clean, well filtrated and airated.

Feeding: Omnivorous, some vegetable matter is required in their diet as well as more meatier foods like bloodworms. They will except most foods ranging from commercailly prepared flakes to live foods. Sometimes they will also graze on algae.

Sexing and Breeding: Males can sometimes be distinguished by a slimmer body and black lines/markings on the anal fin. Breeding has occasionally happened in the aquaria but it is rare and hard due to their aggression towards their own species.

This is a relatively small and attractive tropical fish. However, although less of a nuisance than E.bicolor they can still show aggression towards tropical fish of a similar shape and size so they do not make good community tropical fish in all cases. Do not keep more than one of this genus to a tank. Captive breeding has now produced an albino form but it is still a equally aggressive tropical fish.

Tropical Fish

When you start talking with beginner tropical fish hobbyist about breeding guppies the first thing you hear is, “That’s not hard to do. Just get a small tank and add water, and insert guppies. Wait a few days and you have them breed.” Well for the most part this is a simplified version of what I intend to talk about in this article. But, there is more.

A five-gallon tank will work for a trio of one male and two females, but if you want more, than I would say use a ten-gallon tank so that you can have two males and up to ten females. The latter of the two is what people that raise show quality guppies do to increase their chances of seeing all the traits in just a single tropical fish that they are looking for. Make sure the water is cycled to avoid any ammonia or nitrite spikes. One tablespoon of aquarium salt should be added for each ten-gallons of water. Guppies do much better in water that has a little salt added to it. Floating fake plants are used quite often, but another thing I like to use is a weighted spawning mop made from a dark green or dark blue colored yarn. These mops give great refuge for the fry, so that the other adult fish do not eat them before you have a chance to move the adults to another tank. And yes, I said move the adults. It’s much easier to catch up to twelve adult fish that are at least an inch long or larger, than it is to catch up to one hundred very tiny guppy fry.

As far as what to feed the guppies to condition them for breeding, I suggest black worms, half a cube of frozen bloodworms, half a cube of frozen brine shrimp, and/or a few good quality flake foods such as foods made for guppies, or plankton/krill/spirulina flakes, and some occasional liver flakes, etc. The best advice I can give about feeding your fish is to vary the diet, and do not feed them the same thing each and every day. Your tropical fish will thank you for doing this by growing faster, looking better, and being healthier in the long run.

There is much more to breeding guppies, some of which not everyone will decide to follow. A lot of people see a nice Cobra Delta-tailed Guppy at the store and decide that’s the fish they wish to breed, so in that process that same person either buys a female or two at the same store or they visit a different store to purchase the female or males, which ever the case may be. Meanwhile, there are other tropical fish hobbyist that do some researching and locate a specific color and/or fin strain that they wish to breed. These strains may cost up to, if not more than $85 for a trio (one male and two females). But, keep in mind that the breeder that has these fish for sale has been working on this strain for quite some time using a process of “line-breeding” to keep the strain as nice looking and pure as possible. These are the potential breeders of a show quality guppy. Don’t get me wrong, some breeders have taken the average guppy from a local shop and through line breeding have developed some very beautiful show guppies. Neither of the two ways that you get your guppies will produce a show quality guppy rightaway; this generally takes a bit of time, sometimes over 5 years. It all depends on what you are looking for in the guppies, and how devoted to the objective you are.

Currently I am working with some store bought guppies, one of my males has a green colored body with a snake skin pattern that starts right behind the gill plates and carries on back to the beginning of the tail, hence its name “green snake skin”. The fins of this fish are what’s called a “delta-tail.” This is a tail fin that is about three times as tall from top to bottom as the fish’s body is from bottom of belly to the top of its back. And the dorsal fin is long and floats through the water like the tail of a common Crowntail Betta. Both the tail fin and the dorsal fin have matching yellow/green/black dotted patterns. This male is being bred to similar looking females. And since these tropical fish are not related genetically (at least not to my knowledge) this is known as selective breeding. Selective breeding is when you buy your fish and you look for the traits you wish to have in the offspring in the breeding stock you are planning to purchase. Line breeding is when you take the offspring from this group of breeders and mate them back to the original breeding group. For example, you would take the female offspring and mate them back to the male of the original group (father to daughter), or you take a pair of males and breed them back to the original female that they came from (very accurate record keeping is needed for this method of breeding sons back to mother). But, many of the top guppy breeders in the world will tell you, it is much better to breed the daughters back to the father than it is to breed the mother back to the sons.

By breeding the daughters back to the father you have a much higher chance of seeing the desired traits. From this point on you will be doing some very heavy culling of the unwanted offspring to keep just the traits you are looking for. When I say culling the offspring I am talking about pulling the slower growing or less colorful males and females from the group and keeping only the best looking fish. You also pull out any deformed fish as well since these would not make for good breeding stock in the future. There are a few different ways to get rid of the culled fish, but please, never just flush them down a toilet. The fish do not die right away and end up suffering from breathing in toxins that no one should have to breathe in, or swim in for that matter. Instead either feed them to a larger fish (not everyone likes this method either), or place them in a small bag with water and place them in the freezer. By freezing them they just slowly start to hibernate like they would during a winter season and finally just stop living altogether. This is said to be the most humane way to do this. And of course there are people that do not agree that the previously mentioned method is actually humane either. So, you are left picking and choosing your battle so to speak.

Once you are happy with some of the guppies you have been able to produce throughout all this time, you can now consider locating an International Fancy Guppy Association sanctioned fish show and enter your tropical fish in the show. At this point I would suggest competition in the Novice category since it can be really disappointing to be in competition against some of the breeders that have been entering shows for many years and then not place well, or you may hear some remarks about how your fish should not be in that category. I have been to a few of the shows and heard a lot of bad talking about other hobbyist fish, and sometimes its not pretty language either. Or you could even start by showing your fish in your local club’s “Bowl Show” (just a gentle hint to the members of the club I am a member of). It’s always a good feeling to enter your fish and take the chance of winning some form of an award, such as but not limited to, a first, second, or third place ribbon. The prize is not as important as how the hobbyist feels when he/she sees their tropical fish on display with one of those ribbons near it.

And there is always a chance that you will be able to produce a new color variant or strain and it will be seen at a local or larger tropical fish show. You too will be able to sell some of your quality offspring to other hobbyists that have chosen to follow in the same direction as you have for tropical fish.

Tropical Fish - Pleco

Common name: Royal Panaque, Royal Plec Tropical Fish

L-Numbers: L027a, L027b, L027c, possibly others

Scientific name: Panaque nigrolineatus

Family: Loricariidae

Origin: South America (Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela)

Water chemistry: Ideally around neutral, but adaptable

Maximum size: Potentially up to 40 cm, but usually much smaller

Minimum Tank Size: Adults will need at least a 90 cm tank

Care: Royal plecs are not quite as tough as common plecs, but they are still relatively hardy and adaptable tropical fish fish. The critical stage is buying and acclimating a new specimen to your aquarium. Newly imported specimens are often significantly underweight, and some specimens fail to recover and eventually die, regardless of the care lavished on them by the aquarist. Specimens likely beyond hope will have sunken eyes and hollow bellies. Most however will quickly regain condition if kept in a quiet aquarium (preferably a quarantine tank) and fed plenty of vegetables, wood, and occasionally supplements of meaty foods such as bloodworms. (Note that royal plecs should not be regularly fed meaty foods; see Comments below.)

Royal plecs can be kept in a range of water conditions from soft and acidic through to hard and alkaline. My specimen lived for seven years in a mbuna tank where pH and hardness were both very high, and is currently in a soft water aquarium where the pH is around 6 and there is very little hardness at all. I have seen a specimen in a tropical store kept in slightly brackish water (SG 1.002) along with scats and monos, but personally wouldn't recommend it; but this does show how adaptable these fish can be, once they are healthy and feeding well.

These fish are nocturnal, and adults are often even more retiring that juveniles. It may take months for a fish to settle in sufficiently that it will come out by day. My specimen will feed during the day, particularly if offered a few catfish pellets or a slice of courgette.

Social Behaviour: Like most of the larger plecs, these fish are territorial. They will sometimes coexist happily enough with smaller loricariids, such as Ancistrus, provided there is plenty of room and the fish do not need to fight over resting sites. Otherwise these fish are completely peaceful and will ignore any fish that leaves them alone. They are perfectly capable of looking after themselves, and will respond to bullying by cichlids in kind, but in such aquaria are likely to become very shy and retiring.

Feeding: These tropical fish need to be fed primarily on vegetables, algae, and bogwood. Among the vegetables readily accepted are carrot, courgette (zucchini), cucumber, lettuce leaves (blanched), peas (cooked), and spinach. Standard plec algae wafers and pellets will be taken as well. Bogwood is a critical component of the diet of these tropical fish. These fish eat the wood and actually digest it (most other plecs simply need the wood as a source of dietary fibre).

Planted Aquaria: Strangely, Royal plecs generally ignore soft-leaved plants but can, and probably will, damage plants with stiff stems or hard leaves. In my aquaria, my royal plec does not damage (except accidentally uprooting) Cabomba, water lilies, Hydrocotyle, and Vallisneria, for example. On the other hand, the stems of Hygrophila stricta, Rotala indica, and Bacopa monnieri are sometimes nibbled on, and the leaves of various Echinodorus species are simply grazed down to the stem. Isolated stems of hairgrass are swum through, breaking them in two, but bunches of hairgrass seem to survive.

Sexing: Both male and female fish develop bristles (odontodes) on the cheeks and pectoral fins, so these are an unreliable character for sex determination. It is believed that sexually mature males have longer bristles. Otherwise, males and females are identical.

Breeding: In the wild, the females lay their eggs in nests underneath nocks in fast-flowing streams. Fishermen in their native habitat recognise that royal plecs tropical fish move to streams with rocks substrates. Females produce around 600 relatively large (2-3 mm), bright yellow eggs. These fish have spawned only very rarely in aquaria, and details are lacking.

Growth is slow. Scientists have optimised growth rate by carrying out large water changes every few days. These fish are long-lived; my specimen is around 11 years old and still only half grown, being around 15 cm long.

Comments: A common mistake made with these fish is to feed them mussels, prawns, and other meaty foods. They do not need them. The basis of the diet must be wood and vegetables, which is what they eat in the wild. Moreover, meaty foods were believed to cause fat deposits around the internal organs found by a scientist working on Panaque catfish. Vegetable proteins (soy, algae, etc.) are a much safer option. Meaty foods like bloodworms can make useful treats or to fatten up newly imported specimens, but should not otherwise be an important part of the diet of these tropical fish.