PlanetCatfish.com

this is a topic born from a discussion on the Dutch cichlidforum, but i think it's interesting enough for the Planet

not in the least because i strongly believe that the crux of this basket is why almost any cichlid can be bred in captivity and almost all catfish are tough as nails when it comes to hacking the code.

it boils down to this:
WHY do we change the biotope of our riverine fish into something as unchanging and stable as a Malawi tank?

we keep our riverine fish at the same temperature all year long
we do the same with pH, hardiness, KH for those who like to muck about with carbondioxide and perhaps add oakleaves or beech.
but we do NOT, or rarely (only hardcore nutters go for it) swing with the seasons, apart from the occasional cool-water change to kickstart the ol' fat female Corydoras species into spawning mode.


apart from fish that can be found smack on the equator (a lot of Amazonian fish) or Riftlake fish (Malawi, Tanganyika) the environment of our tropical fish makes huge changes every single year!
once the Monsoon comes, a river in Mexico (they don't call it 'Monsoon', but my Spanish doesn't exist) drops it's hardiness by more than half, likely by over 4/5th; the temperature goes down from 30 to 19'C and the oxygen levels go through the roof.

and in that rainy season it often rains several times a day.
buckets
really pissing down.
from what I remember when I was in the tropics, in the Wet it often rains in the morning, clears a bit around noon, starts to get truly torrential after that and clears out just before dusk.

imagine imitating that on a small scale by simply hooking an extra powerhead to a timer and imitating the influx of oxygen in the morhing and the afternoon

or keeping a record and turning up the heater in summer, softening the water in september and dropping the temperature in oktober; but slowing waterchanges in februari and adding beech leaves in april, working around to the hot mineral- and rotten leaf-rich waters in auguast.
just before we start doing our home Moonsoon season!



instead, we keep our tropical riverines like a bogwood version of a Tropheus tank

me thinks we're on the wrongf track here and I blame it on stubbornly following outdated books all written down in the 1950's and 95% of all fishy literature is just a lot of copyright violations from then on.


it is any surprise that -for example!- Rift lake Syno's are bred by the millions?
grandiops, multipunctatus, Polli White, lucipinnis, petricola, poplli and even granulosus have been bred, all without using hormones.

but riverine Syno's haven't been bred without needles except for a few very rare instances, beginning with Harold Pinters' sole success breeding the nigriventris a single time over 40 year ago.


we have the knowledge:
we can get weather reports from Mexico to Bolivia, from Indonesia to Cameroon.
it's all there, on the web.
we know how to change the temperature (dead easy), oxygen (powerheads, diffusors, airstones, wet/dry filtration), the hardiness and acidity, the list goes on.
heck, we can even get the lengths of day and switch the timers on to the TRUE daylengths of our Peruvian L number collection.

and it's all sooooo simple

no, we don't need to change our Mexican fish tank into a mudflood. and we don't have to drop the temperature from 31'C to 18'C in 15 minutes.

but we DO need to take a good look omn our hobby
scratch ourselves behind the ears at all those "unbreedable" catfish species
and add the long term thinking

instead of turning all fishtanks worldwide into rainforest versions of a Riftlake set up where nothing changes
(I'm generalizing, I'm an old Tanganyika nut and in the Rift seasons count too, but subtle)

we can re invent fishkeeping if we ditch those old books, if we stop flogging all those dead horses and take the first step into finding the Reasons behind the Seasons

we might hack quite a few codes

anyone ever bred Rhamdia's without a needle? or Pseudomystus siamensis?

show me your thoughts about this; how would YOU put in "year-thinking" in your hobby, instead of "week-thinking" until the next regular waterchange?

;)

Well, you've got the wheels turning in my head. How to duplicate the seasons without sacrificing water quality is what I'm battling with for starters. In some areas water quality gets poorer in the dryer seasons. Interesting subject for sure & I'm curious to see what ideas others have as I work out details in my own head.

I do think you are right. People who breed reptiles and amphibians do it all the time. Lots of our fishes who are "impossible" to breed live in the same area as reptiles & amfibians that are bred very easy when you give them seasons.

in theory I agree with this concept and as well my wheel in my head get rolling.
The African difference is that when you have the monsoonal rains that they gather on the plains and they go to the rivers mostly thus the water temp variety is not that large, where as in the Amazon, the rains also come from the snow peak mountains cooling the rivers...a very basic decription in my view. I firmly believe if you mimic the fishes needs then you are successfull, like maybe dropping the water in the tank by 50% for 3 weeks, then filling it up again with a power head and diffuser to try and mimic the rainy season. I also however know that a loot of L keepers just are successful in breeding with doing nothing special, just good water quality ane leaving them alone. I do however think your points are very interesting. cheers jk

I agree there is a lot of mileage in this for some species, but for others not. I'd suggest, for example, main channel amazon fishes don't get a great deal of variance with the seasons. Many, many others do, but it is one part of the jigsaw. Consider loricariid caves or cuckoo hosts.

Personally I think you have to look at a species, research the heck out of its range, and then formulate a strategy. Then spend a long time carrying that out.

I also believe that you need to take some time out for our lovely catfishes and go bred other fishes and come back to the cats with an enhanced skill set.

I think Synodontis and Mystus in particular are great candidates for this...

Jools

So, why not make a plan, share ideas of what we've tried? Why not pick a list of species that haven't been bred & see what we can do as a group? Set goals, make plans, share ideas--sounds like it could be a fun year if we could get on the same page on a few species.

I'm one of the nuts Sid referred to above

I keep fish from Uruguay, and this is a sub-tropical country. The south tips 35 degrees lattitude, the north 30

Therefore in the south (those data are better) the average in January is 22 C (I averaged the average day and night temperature, for 2001-2011) and in June it is 10 C. Obviously, day length also varies

I keep the fish @ 10-12 C in winter and @ ~20 C in summer. In winter the day is min 10 houra and in summer 14 max (but many are in my garden, having a Dutch day of 16 hrs and a Dutch climate, warm during the day and cold at night)

My Rhineloricaria breed like rabbits. In fact most fishes breed very easily

I think Sid is on to something. Remember, most fishes are migratory breeders: Even a tetra swims away to breed, from the deep regions whewre they live to the shallow ones where they breed. Cichlids are an exception, they breed where they live - and therefore, keeping them healthy implies you are quite close to breeding them

For many tetras we know how to breed them: Prepare a small tank with soft water and net a male and a female from the big tank. Give them time to adapt to the soft water and release them in the small tank.

Good change the next day will see lots of eggs if protection agains egg eating is available

I think the key word here is de change in water. Emphasis on change

Very interesting discussion! Great thread.

I think part of the problem is that we really don't know enough about exactly what conditions trigger a given species to spawn. There are many climatic variables to control. For example, do they spawn when:

(1) spring time (temp and day length increase, conductivity may increase)
(2) hot weather brings a "monsoon" rain (temp increases and conductivity decreases)
(3) cool weather brings rain (temp decreases and conductivity decreases)
(4) hot, dry weather (temp increases a lot, and conductivity increases)
(5) flood waters rise (temp stays same and conductivity decreases)

These are five simplistic examples, and I'm sure we can think fish that breed under each of these circumstances. It is not easy to find out what applies to "our" species in question?

The reason most people ignore seasonality in their aquaria is clear enough: it's extra work, and not necessary for the well-being of the fish. Seasons are not necessary for keeping fish.

However, most fish require specific environmental cues to breed. Breeding any species is entirely a matter of conditioning the fish and finding the right environmental trigger. Finding the right trigger isn't always easy - when I tried breeding Otocinclus arnoldi I varied conductivity, temperature, feeding, and even overwintered them cold, without managing to trigger a spawn. Possibly the changes I provided weren't sufficiently large to trigger breeding; with one fish I bred (Crenuchus sp.), I salted the water under the "dry season" to ensure that there would be a large and sharp enough drop in conductivity when the "rainy season" arrived.

I appreciate this thread. It makes me sad because I have so many unsuccessful breeding attempts. I just have to know to remind myself it doesn't change anything, just that I may know the source of the failures.If I didn't have mystery problems , I would love to take this advice and use it towards another breeding attempt.

I have been attempting to do this with agamyxis for a few years now, I think I was getting somewhere with my last batch just before I fried them accidentally.

I wonder if I'm the only person who opened this thread expecting some talk about December and Jesus. Stupid American things!

But this does bring up some good points! The only way I ever got my ball pythons to breed was via an accident when their heat source burned out and they went through a cooldown. Next summer I was shocked to find a female brooding eggs.

Right now I'm trying the same with some Brazilian rainbow boas.

As for failures, Maccus, remember that it is the very very rare person who succeeds on the first try. Ever seen the movie Meet the Robinsons? It has a pretty good message with that.

Fascinating discussion - as a relatively new "fish keeper" I learn a lot from following these forum discussions and am grateful that I have found several what really make sense (and this is one of them) - last night I subscribed to Amazonia and downloaded the PDF version and read all the tremendous in-depth articles about L-xxx breeding - I have one tank with "common fish - platies - tetras ,etc - three with Cichlids (just building) and one for learning/trying to breed my BN catfish (building caves from rock as detailed also on this forum. Really great site - and by the way Shane is a member of the CCA here in the Capital area - hope to get to meet him soon now that he has returned from Africa.

Taratron , Possibly I should explain, I was not interested in a breeding project for the sake of a breeding project. If I was, I would not have chosen Synodontis Eupterus, a catfish that costs about $8-12 retail. I would have carefully selected a more valuable synodontis species for a breeding programme.
The whole breeding project was one that came out of some special fish and wanting them to leave some descendents. When the time comes that when I get a better job, re-home my fish and move away, their babies will be out there carrying on the linage of my special catfish. That would mean a lot to me.
When these are gone, I won't be getting another breeding group to replace them. There wouldn't be any reason left to pursue another breeding group of Synodontis in this tank. My three goldfish will most likely "inherit" this aquarium when pass away.

That said, I wish others good luck where I did not have any.

I wonder if I'm the only person who opened this thread expecting some talk about December and Jesus. Stupid American things!

I'm a radical heretic atheist with a tendency to occult paganism; anything related to organized monotheistic patriarchial religion would be completely out of character for me


anyways; I think we have a fair number of fascinating replies here

in the past I have used tricks like the length of day, temperature and even adding pollen, certain insects as food and changing pH in coordination with each other to breed some fish

most of the time it was bust, but I have bred 2 generations of the Panamese Hoplosternum punctatum from a wildcaught pair using tricks.

some other fish reacted to this as well.
I'm currently stumped trying to breed my Madagascar fish, so once I have left the chaos of refurnituring my new house and setting up the new tanks behind me, I'll take a dive into this
be assured that i'll keep a log, here as well as on my pc.
;)

Great information & good ideas. When I first tried to breed discus, I tried the temperature & water changing tricks and got bubkus. Then one day, we had a thunderstorm & I got 2 spawns. Then when ever we had a good rain, my discus would spawn. It didnt matter what I did as long as it rained. I feel that in seasonal spawners like we're discussing, one environmental queue (which we have no control over but can try to schedule the cycle around) is our regional bad weather season to use the changing barometric pressure to our advantage.

I take advantage of my mood swings.
I get into long doldrums and neglect my fish.
When I come out of them I provide my fish excellent care.
These are the seasons of my fish and it has worked well for me for nearly 50 years.

I am not convinced that barometric pressure changes are a direct influence on fish. In normal earth conditions water is incompressible so by what mechanism would fish be able to sense there is an atmospheric pressure change? When associated with dramatic changes of temperature and precipitation I can see the possibilities that the changes matter in the aggregate.
Fish experience far more change in ambient pressure by merely swimming up or down in the water column a couple feet.
I have bred wild Discus at all times of the year and in all types of weather since 1969.
I have never observed any relationships between when they bred and what the weather was like.

@ Larry

I think Discus - and all fish only breathing with gill will, indeed not be able to sense changes in barometric pressure

But all fish breathing air every now and then, might still be able to sense it. Agreed, they will need specialized sensing - a Corydoras swimming 30 cm to the water surface will find a difference in pressure comparable with 1000 or 1030 mbar. 1000 is quite low and 1030 is quite high - but if nature intends to sense the difference - for instance to start preparing for the breeding season - nature will find a way

Great topic. Got me planning too. I do it for my orchids and other plants so why not with my fish? They deserve better.

Thanks.