The Darter Online

		Pat's Picks Below are some articles from recent issues of the Darter, the official publication of the Missouri Aquarium society. To receive this bimonthly publication, all you need to do is become a member of MASI. Pat Tosie, Editor
Featured "darticles" this month: Cyperaceae by Maureen Green NEW A Rough Ride with a Tiny Horse by Mike Hellweg Bits o' History by Mike Hellweg The Honduran Episode by Patrick A. Tosie, Sr. Wild Fish Collecting in Missouri OR How We Survived the Heat by GW Lange Tropheus: A Beginners View by Mike Misuraco A Tale of Two Tiger Tanks by Tom Schnur Spawning Synodontis Petricola by Harold and Derek Walker Spawning Synodontis Multipunctatus by Harold and Derek Walker Pseudosphromenus Dayi (Spike Tail Gourami) by Randy Ison The Drive for Fish (Another Central American Collecting Trip) by Patrick A. Tosie, Sr. White Worms — A Great Supplemental Live Food by Jack Heller Dwarf African Redworms by Randy Ison

Cyperaceae by Maureen Green

For years, I've seen pictures and read descriptions of plants called cyperus in my house plant books and have searched greenhouses and plant stores for them. It wasn't until I got into water gardening, that I found out that you had to go to a specialty store, namely for water plants to locate one.

Cyperus are both tropical (ex: cyperus papyrus) and hardy (ex: cyperus longus "Sweet Galingole") are found all over the world.

For propagation, you can divide them by cutting through the root ball with a sharp knife or cut off the flower head with a little bit of stem attached, trim back the bracts by half their length and either float in water or put it in a dish of soil or sand and keep moist. When the roots have developed, pot it up in soil. You can also bend a stalk down (still attached to the plant) into water until another plant develops.

I usually discard the parent plants at the end of summer and pot up the babies into plastic cups, keep them on the window sill all winter and barely moist. They seem to go into semi-dormancy. I don't fertilize them until the end of March of the next year. I use an aquarium fertilizer then. By the end of April I put them outside in a larger pot and fertilize them with a lily tab. They grow fast.

A Rough Ride with a Tiny Horse by Mike Hellweg
Hippocampus zosterae, The Dwarf Seahorse

The Dwarf Seahorse, Hippocampus zosterae, is a truly diminutive creature. The name in print on this page is longer than the fish is in real life! It is a truly amazing animal that many people don't even believe exists. Until recently, it was the smallest member of it's genus. But now two more diminutive Seahorse species have been found - one of them just within the last few months. A fish that swims upright with the head of a horse; a high-powered vacuum/trapdoor contraption for a mouth; an armor plated body shaped like the knight of a chess set; a prehensile tail like a monkey; a nearly invisible dorsal fin that beats 75 times a second; males that go through labor and give birth to living young; eyes that move independently of each other like those of a chameleon; the ability to change color; and even to grow camouflage. Wow! And it's for real, not a creature of fantasy!

Ever since I was young, I've seen the ads in the classified sections of various magazines: "Live Sea Horses! Males give birth to cute Sea Ponies! For just $1.00 (okay, I've seen the ads for a LONG time!), you can bring these mystical creatures into your home!" I love reading ads - ads of all kinds, but especially aquarium and hobby related ads. It often amazes me what the adman will come up with to get you to buy whatever it is that he is hawking. Remember Sea Monkeys™? What an amazing ad campaign for brine shrimp! But the amazing thing about the ad for the Seahorse is that it doesn't have to make anything up to make these fascinating creatures desirable. The only drawback, and it is a big one, is that they are difficult to properly care for. In fact, aside from the Dwarf Seahorse, most Seahorse species are better left to the dedicated specialist, or in the wild. In this article I want to share some of my experiences with trying to keep and breed these magnificent miniatures.

Earlier this year, a hobbyist looking for some of the fish I had for sale on Aquabid contacted me. He wanted to trade, not buy fish. Usually I'm not too interested in doing this since you don't really know with whom you are trading and there is no umbrella organization like the AKA or ACA to regulate the trade. But what he offered in trade was too tempting! He had a group of tank raised Dwarf Seahorses that he wanted to trade for a group of my Swordtails! I hastily accepted. I could afford to loose a group of juvenile Swords and the postage for the chance at getting a group of the long-coveted Dwarf Seahorses - and tank raised at that!

I quickly set up one of my Show tanks (which I normally keep just for the MASI annual show) for the Seahorses. It's one of those fancy Marineland Eclipse 6-gallon tanks with the wet-dry power filter and light fixture built in. It would be perfect! I filled it with 6 pounds of crushed coral and mixed the salt mix into a 5-gallon bucket of water. I did not add a heater - they would be fine at room temperature. Kathy Deutsch helped me out with a starter of Caulerpa, (a funky wiry species I have not identified yet) and I picked up 5 pounds of live rock. The tank was ready. While I was waiting for the Seahorses to arrive, I started seeing all kinds of little critters crawling about the tank. This came back to bite me, but more on that later.

I shipped out the Swordtails right before one of the interminable snowstorms we experienced last winter moved in. They arrived just fine, but we decided to wait until later for him to ship the fish to me. About a week later, he shipped the fish. And another one of those nasty snowstorms rolled in. My mail carrier carefully delivered the tiny box to me 3 days later. I was amazed. He didn't use my comparatively giant box (12 x 12 x 12 styro) to ship the fish back. He put them into a 5 x 5 x 5 cardboard box! There was no styro - they were wrapped in newspaper! I figured they would be dead for sure. I carefully unwrapped the bag, expecting the worst. But they were all fine! The water temperature was 56°F, but they were all swimming around the bag looking none the worse for wear. Here I learned Lesson #1 - they are VERY hardy!

I put them into a small bucket, and started a drip line from the tank to the bucket. I did not want to warm them up too quickly, so I tied a knot in the line to slow the drip to just a drip every five seconds or so. A couple hours later, they were swimming in a bucket of mostly my water. I carefully netted them out of their bucket and put them into their new home. I refilled the difference in tank water with some more fresh salt water that I had mixed up the day before - never add the shipping water to your tank. Here I learned Lesson #2 - they are deceptively fast and are more difficult to net than you would expect! They can really get moving when they need to! They straighten out and go for broke. And they can hang onto the edges of the net and refuse to let go! Moving them to their new home was an amusing and interesting experience.

Once in the tank, I could see them more clearly. I had 9 fish - 7 females and 2 males. And one of the males was bulging. They settled in quickly, and went about exploring the tank. Here I learned Lesson #3; a six-gallon tank is too big for 9 Dwarf Seahorses. As they settled in, they disappeared! It took me a little longer each day to find them as they got better and better at blending in with their surroundings. People who visited the fishroom just smiled and said something like "sure, there are all kinds of Seahorses in there!". If I couldn't see them and I knew where to look, I guess they could not see them at all!

As soon as they were all in their new home, I gave them a feed of newly hatched brine shrimp. Here I learned Lesson #4; the Eclipse Six filter is very efficient! It removed most of the live baby brine within a few hours. After this, I turned off the filter whenever I fed the fish. But the Dwarfs also learned; they started hanging around the inlet to the power filter when I turned the filter back on. Smart little guys!

NEWLY HATCHED brine shrimp is the preferred food for Dwarf Seahorses. If it is more than 36 hours old, it needs to be fortified with a HUFA (Highly Unsaturated Fatty Acid) supplement like Selco®. If it is NEWLY hatched, it still has plenty of nutrient value for the Seahorses, and can serve as their sole diet, unlike with the larger Seahorses. After the third molt, which occurs at about 36 hours post hatch, the brine shrimp has little nutrient value and needs to be fed (or "loaded") with a supplement to make it more nutritious.

The next day after arrival, the bulging male presented me with 3 baby seahorses. Two of these were stillborn (I assume from the stress of shipping), but the third was actively exploring the tank looking for food. It was a long, skinny, miniature copy of mom & dad. All stretched out, it would have been barely 3/8" from tip to tip. I figured the live baby brine would be too large for it, but it managed just fine. I watched for a while, and it carefully stalked and ate several shrimps while I watched. Hey, this was going to be easy! Yeah, right…

A little less than two weeks later, the same male presented me with a batch of 8 little ponies. The other male never did produce any fry - maybe he was already beyond his reproductive age - I don't know. I didn't realize how much the first pony had grown until I saw the newborns. Wow! They grow fast! I put a nylon net breeder in the tank to allow the fry something to hang onto so they could feed near the surface where the majority of the brine shrimp congregated after an hour or so. Here I learned Lesson #5 - They are eating machines! Within a few hours, most of the brine shrimp was gone, and the babies were bulging - so were the adults.

I did some research in a couple of books on Seahorses and found out that the gestation period of the Dwarf Seahorse is only 10 days! Not only do they grow fast, but they develop quickly from egg to pony! During their breeding season, the male is almost always in some stage of pregnancy. It didn't take long until that one little male had produced quite a few little ponies. I have also read that male and female seahorses pair bond. Some authors claim it is for life, others claim it is just for one breeding cycle. Well, that little stallion and those little fillies certainly never read those accounts. At one time or another, I saw him entwining tails with at least 4 of the 7 females! Interestingly, the other male never seemed to be interested in the girls, only in food. He was always the first one to the feeding area when I was in the fishroom.

As I became more familiar with my fish's behavior, I was able to watch the mating dance of the seahorse. It is much more elaborate than that of the other livebearers I have observed. The male puffed his pouch at the female; they bowed to each other, entwined tails, and rose up together in the water column with their bellies touching. They did this several times, and I guess one of these times the female actually transferred eggs to the male. Some sources mention that you can sometimes see the eggs, as one or two miss the pouch and fall to the bottom of the tank, but I did not see this.

Here are some other tidbits that I learned through reading and observation - they are presented in no certain order: Dwarf Seahorses spend much of their time hanging upside down in the current, searching for food. Don't get excited, this is normal. They seem to change color fairly regularly due to changes in mood, etc. Each fish looks a bit different and you can easily recognize individual fish after a while. Certain fish seem to have a certain "basic color" that they maintain most of the time, but it darkens and lightens throughout the day, and as they interact with one another. Dwarf Seahorses have small broods - even large males will only deliver 8 - 10 ponies. Males seem to be always pregnant during mating season. They usually mate within a day or two of delivery. Don't let them go even a day without food - they don't have a proper stomach, and due to their exoskeleton they do not build up fat reserves, so they need to eat constantly. If you can't provide food for them on a daily basis, don't try to keep them. Young Dwarf Seahorses will also eat freeze-dried Cyclopeeze. I tried the frozen stuff, too, but they seemed more interested in the way the freeze-dried stuff floated and twisted in the current. You can have quite a few Dwarf Seahorses in a 6-gallon tank. At one point I had more than 40 of them happily swimming about. But that is where disaster set in.

At first, I lost a few of the adults. The other male that didn't deliver any fry went first - I suspect due to old age. Dwarf Seahorses only live for about a year, and he may have already been 10 months or more old when he arrived. Then I noticed that there were fewer fry coming up to feed. At about the same time, I noticed a large bloom of Hydroids, including a group that sexually reproduced and produced their free-swimming, jellyfish like Medusa stage. Hydroids eat live baby brine just like the Seahorses, so they were prospering on the same food as my fish. For those of you who don't know what they are, Hydroids are a group of animals related to Anemones, Hydra, Corals, Jellyfish, and other stinging animals. They look like miniature Anemones, with a fat oral disk and short, fat tentacles. They don't eat adult Dwarfs, nor do they seem to eat baby Dwarfs. But they do sting them and can cause fatal injuries to the ponies. Everything I read said that there was no cure, that I was doomed to failure.

But there is a cure - the same thing many hobbyists use to kill Hydra in freshwater tanks. I dropped a quarter tablet of Fluke Tabs® into the filter. The next day, all of the Medusae were gone, and most of the Hydroids had closed up. By the end of the week, all of the Hydroids were gone, and I haven't seen any since. However, the Fluke Tabs® kill other Inverts, too. I lost a nice group of Feather Duster Worms that was growing on the live rock, some sponges also declined and later died, and I lost several other little creepy crawlies that were pretty neat. Since then I haven't seen the tiny little starfish that came with the live rock, either.

But even after this, day by day I was seeing fewer Seahorses, and no bodies. Something was going on - but what? I pulled all of the live rock out, looked it over closely, and put it back in - nothing there. Or so I thought! Here I learned lesson #6 - the nasty little creepy crawlies can hide VERY well. A few days later I found my very pregnant male sticking out of a little hole that I had not noticed before. I gently pulled on him, he struggled a bit, and something pulled back! Eventually I worked him out of the hole, but not before the tiny Pistol Shrimp that held the other end had done fatal damage. The Pistol Shrimp disappeared back into his little hole. I removed the live rock immediately from the tank. Mr. Pistol Shrimp wasn't going to get anymore fresh Seahorse meals! This is where I learned Lesson #7 - don't use live rock with Dwarf Seahorses. Too many of the cute little creepy crawlies that come with it can be deadly to your little Seahorses. Live rock is great in other situations, but keep it out of Dwarf Seahorse tanks! Since I removed the live rock, I haven't lost a single Seahorse. Unfortunately, all of the fish I have left are females. So I guess I'll have to break down and respond to one of those ads in the back of the magazines to get another male! After all of these years - the adman will finally get me!

To summarize the basic care requirements:
1. Small marine tank - the smaller the better. A 2-1/2 gallon tank would be perfect.
2. Standard marine mix - around a specific gravity of 1.024. Room temperature is fine - but keep it below 80°F.
3. A sponge filter is fine; in fact, it's probably better than the power filter I use.
4. Give them plenty of attaching places. Plastic plants, Caulerpa (first treated with Fluke Tabs®), and other décor work great.
5. Add a few tiny inverts to help with cleanup - turbo snails for algae control, maybe a small starfish, and a few tiny shrimp (the little ½" red guys from Hawaii are best - though I don't know what they are called).
6. Feed NEWLY HATCHED live baby brine shrimp daily - and feed a lot of it. They eat more than you might think! One of the studies I read said that a young seahorse could eat 3000 baby brine shrimp every day.
7. Don't use Live Rock or untreated (with Fluke Tabs®) Caulerpa. Don't add any predatory shrimp or large starfish (which can also eat small seahorses!). Also, stay away from Hermit Crabs - even the tiny ones will eat the Dwarfs if they get a chance. Also, if you want to try keeping marine fish - use another tank. The Dwarfs just won't be able to compete with them for food.
8. Watch them and enjoy their unique behavior!

Bits o' History by Mike Hellweg

Just thought MASI members might enjoy a little bit of the History of the Hobby that I recently came across. As many of you know, I collect older Aquarium Literature, and have quite an extensive collection. Just ask Angela! I'm sure she has one or two things to say about my collection, and they are probably different than what I have to say!

This comes from the January 1957 issue of the Aquarium Journal, the publication of the San Francisco Aquarium Society, Inc. The same folks that bring us the brine shrimp. It is interestingly priced at 30 cents an issue, with a subscription price of $3.00 for twelve issues. In it are 40 pages of information, photos, and ads.

There is an article about the First Marine Only Aquarium Show which was held in Florida on October 7, 1956. There is a list of some of the fish which were shown, as well as inverts and plants. It is amazing the size of some of the tanks they talk about displaying fish in. For example, a 1.5 gallon tank, which took a first place ribbon, displayed a pair of Banded Coral Shrimp, a young Bluefish, a Black Angel, (young, I hope!) AND a French Angel (also young, I hope!) Wow! And no filtration. Of course, they do mention doing large water changes with fresh sea water (easy in Florida in the 1950's). I also get the feeling, from another article, that they did not expect Marine fishes to live very long. I wonder why? Twelve months seems respectable to an Aquarist from the Steinhart Aquarium for a Butterfly Fish to live in captivity. Nowadays that kind of attitude would get a professional Aquarist fired!

One of the most interesting things is the little sidebars, and there are several of these, which do everything from answer questions to provide a look at the aquatic news of the day. One of these is about a group of ichthyologists from the University of California who are trying a new method of shipping fish. It seems that the metal cans add too much to airfreight costs and they were looking for a cheaper way. They came up with shipping fish in plastic bags, loaded with oxygen, and sealed in a thick cardboard box. Sounds kind of silly to us now, but this was great news back then. Thanks to two ichthyologists named Kenneth Norris and William McFarland we now have the easy transport of fishes from all over the world.

Of interest to Rainbowfish fans is an article on the TWO distinct kinds of "bows", Melanotaenia maccullochi and M. nigrans. The author uses live plants in a ten gallon tank with a pair or a reverse trio. She lets the fry hatch in the tank with the adults, and scoops them out as she sees them. Sounds a lot like raising livebearers, doesn't it?

There is an article about seahorses from Donald Simpson of the Steinhart Aquarium. It seems they set up several Marine tanks in the lobby of a movie theater as a promo for a movie about the sea. One of the tanks had several seahorses in it. The tank was pretty much ignored as too dull by most of the movie going public, that is, until the movie came out. It had a long scene of a MALE seahorse giving birth. Then someone noticed that the MALE seahorse in the lobby tank was also giving birth. This resulted in a late night phone call to the author, and a round up of most of the "ponies". He left a few in the tank with the adults at the insistence of the theater manager. It seems there was a great difficulty in raising the fry, as the previous record for the Aquarium was raising 38 out of 585. This time he raised 65 out of 150. He was keeping notes, making observations, and learning with each new try. He comes up with a list of 11 things to do to raise at least some of the fry. I like the last three things: "Pray for luck each night. And morning. And noon. You'll need it". Some encouragement, huh?

Another article called the Beginner's Corner by Albert Klee (anyone in the ACA recognize that name?) cover canned foods for fish such as tuna, shrimp, salmon, bonito and baby foods. The consensus is that the shrimp is the best. All of the others are also discussed, and much is made of cleaning up after feeding to avoid polluting the water.

Speaking of water pollution, there is an article on water pollution in the Marine Aquarium. Much of it is very vague by modern standards, but he does remind the reader to keep tobacco ashes and liquid refreshments out of the tank. He also mentions varnishing the metal tank frame to protect the fish (for a few months, anyway) from the dangers of corroding metals leaching into the water. We've come a long way from that. There is also something interesting about "yellowing water". The author reminds us that you can take the yellow out of the water by putting it in the dark for several days. But this doesn't remove the pollutants, so the best remedy is to throw this "conditioned water" and replace it with fresh seawater. He also seems to feel that inverts, especially anemones, are guilty of polluting the water and making it unsafe for fish. Yeah, I guess they do when they die! Also, it is mentioned that urchins and starfish just die in captivity, so there is little point in keeping them.

There is a book review on a book called "All About Guppies" by Whitney and Hahnel. It is in a second edition and comes highly recommended by the reviewer. The price? $1.75 for this 128 page book.

Then there is a review of a new product, the Miracle Water Softener Pillow, which is still available and working today!

There is a great, though short, article on keeping and breeding a species of Glassfish, Chanda Lala. This is a cousin of Chanda Ranga, the Indian Glassfish that importers seem to love to paint. This article appreciates the natural color, and goes into detail on spawning and raising the tiny fry.

Lastly comes one of my favorite parts, the letters. Questions range from breeding Cynolebias belotti to the best method to separate tubificid worms from their "debris".

The ads are great fun as well. Super Products Corp. of Philadelphia is advertising their Super Filter. It is an early UG filter. The ad copy says "You are free of the work of cleaning or changing the water or gravel in the aquarium forever."!!! Where have I heard that line before? On the next page is the Eureka Aquarium Purifier (UG with subsand perforated tubes instead of a filter plate). It says "Filtration DOES NOT Clean Gravel!" Hmmm. Controversy? There are ads for pumps, plants, live food (the prices are the same today!) , books, catalogs, fish, a couple of pet shops for sale, something called the VITA-MIN-BRICK, special made casters for your up to 30 gallon Metal Frame Aquarium Co. stand, and, the most interesting of all, a "Submergible Thermo-Heater Combination" that heats your tank from the bottom up! I thought submersible heaters didn't come along until the '80's! I guess the newer ones sealed out the water better. I don't remember seeing any in the late '60's or in the '70's at all. Anyone else remember them?

I thought you might enjoy that overview of what was going on in the hobby (through the eyes of the Aquarium Journal) over 40 years ago. Not all that is new really is. And not al you remember from the "Dark Ages" really was. The magazine is nearly 30% Marine. That hasn't changed much. But the size of the tanks sure has! Just two species of 'bows? How about that, Gary? And breeding seahorses and glassfish? And raising them. Without APR or even filtration on the tanks! Oh, and the comments from judges at a fish show (I forgot to mention that) haven't changed at all!

If you come across something like this, take the time to read a little bit. Even though the photos are in black and white, the ideas may not sound so strange. And who knows, you might even learn something new!

The Honduran Episode by Patrick A. Tosie, Sr.

Early morning, Friday, November the first, I set off on an adventure into the Central American country of Honduras. I left St. Louis on TWA to meet with Rusty Wessel in New Orleans and catch our flight on TACA (Take A Chance Airlines) to the town of La Ceiba, Honduras. The first experience happened leaving St. Louis on TWA, fifteen minutes into the flight the Captain tells us over the intercom that they have a broken fuel line and we will be returning to St. Louis to either change planes or fix the line. We get back to St. Louis and they tell us that they have the part and it will take about an hour to fix. I had two hours planned as a layover, however with the problems the plane had, I wouldn't have any time between flights.

I call New Orleans to the TACA counter, they page Rusty, and I talk to Rusty and tell him that TWA will land about the same time TACA is suppose to leave. (I had to meet Rusty because he had my TACA plane ticket) Rusty says he'll meet me at the luggage carousel and help me get to TACA as quick as possible. If I would happen to miss the flight, the next one wouldn't be until the following day.

When I finally get to New Orleans the Captain tells everyone that he has an international traveler that has to make a flight and to let him get off first. The people on the plane cheer for me as I get off and run to the baggage claim and meet up with Rusty. Everyone else comes to the baggage claim, get their luggage and go on to their destination while I wait for mine. My luggage must have been the last onto the baggage claim area!
Rusty helps me with the bags as we run to the TACA counter to check in the luggage. TACA is holding the plane from New Orleans to La Ceiba, Honduras for Rusty and me! On TACA drinks are free and we start getting our money's worth. There is a stop-over in Roatan, an island area known for scuba diving, before we reach La Ceiba at 5:30 PM. It is just getting dark when we reach La Ceiba and we were lucky because if it would have been dark they would not have landed. The airport in La Ceiba does not have radar plus a mountain range is right next to it, so if they can't see they don't fly.

Charlie Pyles, a fellow ACA'er from Louisville is at the airport waiting for us with a rental car and some Honduran money (Lempira). We get through customs without a hitch and are off to our Hotel, the Partanon Beach. The road to the hotel is a short but bumpy twenty-five minute ride from the airport.

The people in Honduras have dark complexions (they are of Spanish and Indian descent) with dark hair and brown eyes. The women are young, beautiful and wear tight clothes, the men are ugly and look like an old pair of army boots that have been through a war. They seem to be happy all the time even though they are very poor. A good wage in Honduras is 300 Lempiras a week ($23.35 in U.S. Dollars at the current exchange rate). Driving conditions are a lot different as well (I enjoyed driving there). They do have speed limits and stop signs, however, the police do not have cars so they can not enforce them. The three basic driving rules that people follow are 1 - Whenever you pass someone, you honk your horn. 2 - The oldest, junkiest car has the right of way. 3 - If you are walking, riding a bike or are in the road for any reason and a car comes by, GET OUT OF THE WAY. You can pass whenever and wherever you want, drive as fast as you want, however, you must stop at any police roadblocks. A police roadblock is an orange cone in the middle of the road with three to six machine gun holding policemen standing around. The police have frequent roadblocks to check your papers and the cars papers (currently, they are having a problem with stolen cars). The police are usually trying to get a bribe to let you pass or they are trying to find the least little thing wrong so they can write you ticket (you pay your ticket right there on the spot to the man writing the ticket.

After we get to the Hotel and check in we are off to a few local bars to sample the native drinks. We get to bed at 4 AM. The next morning I awake at 5:30 and I am ready to go. I walk on the beach for a little while and then I go to Rusty's door (about 8:00) I knock, and he said to come back at eleven. I go to the restaurant and eat a ham, egg and cheese omelet, toast and juice and walk around to see what is there. I do a quick tour of the town, walk down the beach and go to the pier, where a lot of people are fishing, to see what the locals are catching.

The locals are fishing with a line that is wrapped around a stick, or some other object, they have a small hook on the end of the line with a piece of shrimp on it as bait. They throw it into the water and give it little jerks until they catch something. The fish they are catching look like minnows. They throw them into buckets or plastic bags and save them to eat later.

I go back to the hotel at eleven, Rusty and Charlie are getting ready. We eat lunch, make plans on where to go and are off.

The first road block out of La Ceiba is at the Rio Cangrejal and the police detain us, then they tell us to follow them to the police station. One of the policemen get into the van with us and lead us to the station. They say the rental car papers are wrong and we can not take the car, they have to keep it. At first they do not let us take our stuff (camera, collecting items, extra shoes and changes of clothes) out of the car but after a couple hours they let us get our belongings out of the car but they do not let us take the car. We take a Taxi back to the hotel, put our stuff away and go to a bar. They rest of the day is spent between the bars and trying to get the car problem worked out. We go to bed early the next morning.

I wake up at 4:45 AM the following day, the whole trip I can not sleep very late either because I am overly excited or the bed is too lumpy. I take a shower, get dressed and watch some VH-1 on the TV. After a little while I go to the restaurant, get breakfast and watch the waves hit the beach. Late morning Rusty, Charlie and I get a taxi driver, named Israel, to take us to the Rio Jutiapa (the Rio Jutiapa is a clear, fast moving mountain stream where Rusty discovered his namesake fish, (Theraps wesseli) to catch fish. I see Cichlasoma spilurum, some mexicana type tetras (that bite your legs) several Poecilia species, some gobies and catfish. I did not see any Cichlasoma "Theraps" wesseli but this is the location where Rusty found his fish. A lot of local children start to collect to see what the crazy Americans are doing and then they help us catch fish. We pull a seine and get a gallon of Poecilia species. Just up the river from where we are collecting, the local women are doing laundry. There must have been a soccer game the day before because one of them is doing the soccer teams uniforms.

After we collect we take the fish we wanted to keep back to the hotel (the fish we didn't keep the children bagged up to save for their dinner). When we reached the hotel we set up some pumps and airstones in the bags, did a water change, got ready and went bar hopping. There was one bar, which a Canadian guy named Mark owned, that was our favorite place to go. It was a kind of sports bar, it had a couple TV's in it, the bartender could speak English, they had a dart board and they had great food. The bar was also a popular spot for English speaking tourist and locals so you could go there and speak in our native tongue to other English speaking people. Speaking English in a bar to someone that didn't know was something that was very uncommon in Honduras.

The next day we plan to go to the town of Choluteca to catch some Amphilophus (Cichlasoma) hogaboomorus and Anableps dowi. Choluteca is close to the Nicaragua border. The drive from La Ceiba is about 300 miles and take us ten hours. The drive is an experience. At one point Charlie spins the truck around trying to drive too fast on the mountain road across the country. He is driving too fast because he was tailgating some one and when he finally passes them, they start tailgating us with their high beams on. We get to Choluteca, check into a hotel and go to a small tributary of the Choluteca rive and night fish. When we pull up to the creek the first thing we see is EYES skimming across the water. The Anableps are swimming all around. We get into the water and start catching as many as we can of Amphilophus (Cichlasoma) hogaboomorus and the Anableps dowi. When we get our fill, we go back to the hotel, separate the fish and set them up with air and go out to eat.

The next day we go to the Nicaraguan border and try to enter the country. The police detain us at the border, they do not let us take our car across because they say that the papers are wrong. They take us back to the town of San Marcos and keep us for a while. We take the police captain out to lunch and he lets us go after he receives a confirmation from the rental agency over the phone. We are suppose to pick up some paperwork in Tegucigalpa (the Honduran capital city) on our way back to La Ceiba. We go back to the hotel to unload our things, then we go to the bar. Several hours later we go back to the creek where we were the night before to catch some more fish. I have a hard time catching fish, I say they were moving faster, Rusty and Charlie say I've had too much to drink. After we caught our self imposed limit, we head back to the hotel to put the fish away.

After we clean up we go to a nice restaurant, (Charlie, if you see this do you remember; If that a dime in your ear?) have a good dinner, go to a disco for a little while and go to bed. The drive back to La Ceiba the next day goes without any problems.

The next day we go back to the Rio Jutiapa to catch some more fish. I see several Theraps (Cichlasoma) wesseli but am unable to catch them. We get some more livebearers and head back to town.

These are just some of the things that happened, their are a lot more exciting things that happened than time I have to tell you. This was the best time I have ever had related to the aquarium hobby. I would strongly suggest to anyone that gets a chance to go on a collecting trip. If you have any questions, give me a call. My next trip is planned for May of 1997 and I hope to go to Guatemala and Honduras.

All accounts are totally factual unless the facts got in the way of a good story, then they were changed accordingly. If it works for the government, it should work for a fish article.

The Participants
Jungle Jack Heller - Veteran of the African Jungles; Pat Tosie - Mr. ED; Patrick Junior & buddy Patrick Edwards; Noel - "The Sheriff" Roberts; Klaus - "K2" Bertich. I should mention that K2 doesn't mean he's gotten really big like that mountain or anything! K2 = Klaus #2 (I've known K. Schoening longer). Klaus Schoening - native fish collector extraordinaire, our Thursday night speaker, AGA member and AKA member. Mike "P-Man" Hellweg; - Hey, it stands for plants or pres, not for his inability to hold his water! Nathan Pate; the new guy. Collected him off the Internet from the NANFA (native fish) site. He saw some fish in a puddle near the Chain-of-Rocks bridge last year and has been playing in the water ever since. And, of course me, GW. If you don't know I've officially changed my name from Gary to GW. If it works for those cr*p-rappers it works for me! K-1 and GW did some Friday collecting too, which I'll eventually mention, which was much further west and south into the Ozarks. We had a lot of fun on these trips and discovered a few new things too. I have noticed that my discoveries always occur in groups of three and this trip was no different. I think they will be self-evident as you read about our adventures.

Now the first spot we collected on this Saturday in July was at the Bourbeuse River. We collected right near Union MO at the access point. Just look for Dickey Bubs (It's easier to say if you spit next to your feet first), which fortunately turned out to be a True Value type hardware store, but more on that later. Ten years ago when we collected here we caught lots of darters and shiners. We didn't catch as many this time but I'm not sure if it's because the quality of the river had gone down or because the changes in the flow pattern. I guess we'll have to try it again in a few years to see if it changes. We were mainly looking for darters in this location as we had caught 3-4 different species here before. We got in the water a little bit before 9 am and the air was still cool, probably only 90 or 91 degrees.

Catching Darters - A seine and 3-4 people. We caught a few darters this time with this method; lots of shiners and a good sampling of log perch. Stretch the seine across a section of flowing water 4 to 18 inches in depth and allow the net to form a nice U. Keep the net on the bottom. Send one or two volunteers upstream about 3-4 yards. They shuffle quickly towards the net, stirring up the darters and forcing them into the seine. You have to keep shuffling right up to the very edge of the net. Then quickly pick up the net and trap the darters. This can be a source of great fun, especially in slightly swift water with large slippery rocks. We didn't have any close calls this time but I have been a casualty of the current before. Just remember to keep your wallet in a waterproof container. Oh yeah, and that brings us to my first discovery. Now I had left my wallet, on purpose, back in the locked car to ensure that it wouldn't get wet. My fishing license was secured on my person and my watch was waterproof. I had planned ahead and I had avoided all of the pitfalls of a novice collector right?? Well almost!

Keep your Clicker Dry! Klaus and I had been collecting the day before without incident. It's a good thing too since we were miles from any assistance for much of the day. However on this day I accidentally waded in too deep and got the pockets of my shorts wet. Now my wallet was safe and so was my fishing license and watch. However I had never considered protecting "keys" before. The clicker for the car alarm refused to beep after being baptized in the Bourbeuse. Trying the key in the lock only succeeded in proving that the alarm really did work! By the way, pulling the wires to the alarm horn still doesn't solve the problem of the car not starting. After forcing the screws out of the back of the clicker and removing 5 years of blue jean fuzz from the inside we dried the accursed instrument. Finally the problem was solved by a trip to Dicky Bubs, (spit when you say that), and a new battery saved the day. Thank you Noel, for the ride to the store, I will never again mention how many times you've fallen in the water while we've been collecting (was it three times?). I at least owe you that. While I was dripping through the hardware store the rest of the group was eating lunch in the shade. By then the temperature was surely above 95 degrees. I should mention that during the morning, while most of us were seining, K-2 was busy whipping the water with his fishing pole and plastic worm. It was reported that he caught and released two small bass, just about the size of his worm lure, fishing in this manner. He was kind of hoping for some deeper water though, like the Meramec River, to try his luck. We put in ice with our fish to keep the temperature down plus a healthy slug of Amquel. More ice was added as needed to make sure the fish stayed cool. Then it was on to Little Indian Creek and the Meramec River.

Little Indian Creek is on the south side of Hwy 44 past St. Clair. Take Hwy K to "Old Hwy K" and then just look for the water. It only took me about an hour to find this spot the week before. Dr. Thomerson had taken us to this road 10 years earlier and it wasn't' on any of the maps, which brings me to my second discovery. Buy a DeLorme Missouri Atlas & Gazetteer if you are going collecting. Klaus brought his copy and it served us well on our Friday collecting trip. It has all the itty-bitty roads on it including most gravel roads. They cost about $17 but you can get them at Sam's club for $11. Don't leave home without it! On Old Highway K you'll also pass over the Meramec and Little Indian Creek before you come to the access spot. This is the spot that all of the locals use to swim in the creek. The walk down to the creek is quite steep and technically, since Noel didn't actually fall into the creek I can tell you about this mishap. After he steamed down the hill that had a Pike's Peak like steepness, he slipped at the very end and gracefully sat down next to a very large puddle of mud. On a 1 to 10 scale it was only a two or three, but it had the potential to be a ten. After he extracted his one leg from the puddle I dropped in a large rock, which immediately sank out of sight. A large six-foot log quickly followed. Imagine that, "quick mud" at Indian Creek! I should mention here that in the nano-seconds that it took Noel to race down the hill I shouted a warning to watch out for the mud puddle. I am firmly convinced that had I not elected to shout out a warning, Noel would have landed in the center of that puddle and surely would have been pulled under. Therefore it should be noted that I saved Noel's life and should be able to collect a percentage of any lottery winnings that should happen to come his way.

Unfortunately someone is removing gravel from this creek now so there weren't many large 3-5 inch stones that the larger darters like. I think that we would have done better had we walked up the creek a mile or so. We did catch a good variety of fish here though and we got to stalk and catch the infamous Fundulus catenatus. Fundulus catenatus, the Northern Studfish, is also known as the Charley Grimes (CG) Killifish. I'm not sure why it's known as the Charley Grimes fish, perhaps it's because Charley enjoys a good old fashioned game of poker. Catching the "CG" is really difficult as these fish, unlike Charley, have better than 20-20 vision. They see you coming from 15 yards away and keep their distance from you. The only way to effectively catch the big ones is to trap them in a small backwater arm of the creek. Stretch the net across the arm so they can't get out and then have two fools, (that would be me and Pat Tosie), chase them down from the other end and into the net. You really have to do a lot of splashing so that they'll keep going in the other direction and not double back on you. This killifish is much more agile than Charley Grimes ever was, I would call it the Michael Jordan of minnows. You think you have them trapped then, bam, they turn on the juice and all you have is net! I have heard that it helps to have the chasers shout "barbecue" just before the fish get to the net. The fish will eagerly jump into the seine, waiting to be fed. I've heard this technique will also get Charley to cease talking and salivate. So Pat and I chased them down and into the net yelling, "barbecue". Unfortunately we didn't tell our net holders about this secret method of catching these fish. Our net holders were Nathan (remember we picked him up on the Net, he could have been a serial killer) and Jungle Jack Heller, our African trip experienced killifish keeper. I would yell "barbecue" and Jack would then holler "sushi", which would panic the fish causing them either to leap over the net or dash back past Pat and me. By now I was getting pretty mad at Jack for warning our prize fish about their impending imprisonment. Noel was close by cheering us on; I think he wanted to mooch some of our studfish. I should mention at this point Jack's condition, which makes me wonder how he ever survived in Africa. All of you that know Jack, well you know he's really white. Yes, he could hide naked in a snow bank and if he covered his head you'd never see him. By now the 98 plus degree sunshine had baked him pretty red. Even wearing a floppy hat his ears and nose were quite red. If we had handed him a cigar you would have sworn it was WC Fields in the flesh! Good thing we weren't drinking! I think the heat was getting to Jack. Every time I would yell "barbecue" he would yell "sushi" and allow our prey to escape, much to the consternation of Noel. He was getting mighty perturbed. Having several of these wily studfish jump over the net, was just more than Noel could tolerate. He whipped out his gun and plugged that six incher, in mid-air, right between the eyes! After blowing away the smoke from the barrel he only said one word - sushi*1. We suggested to Noel that the heat was getting to him and that he should sit down in the shade next to the water. We moved upstream and out of range.

We eventually walked down Indian Creek about one half mile to where it emptied into the Meramec River. Finally, a large river, where K-2 Bertrich could challenge the "really big fish". However within ten minutes of arriving at the Meramec, his pole was smashed to pieces. He claimed something about falling or some other story but I am convinced that he snagged a log! In his overzealous attempt to set the hook on "the monster bass" he destroyed his rod! Hey Klaus, we caught the log perch in the Bourbeuse, not the Meramec!

The Third and Final Discovery
Although this actually happened on Friday I left it for last. I think if I told you this right off you would have stopped reading and perhaps moved out of state! Klaus Schoening and I had been collecting all day but wanted to try "one more site" before heading back to St. Louis. Using his map we followed a bunch of small gravel roads to find a little spring that fed into a certain creek. We finally found it and what a paradise it was. The Orange throat and Rainbow darters were all brightly colored due to the cool waters of the spring. The Southern Redbelly Dace were brilliantly colored, almost like spring spawning colors. We caught what he needed and then moved out to the creek to investigate the plants in the slower backwater sections. After admiring the lilies and other plants we headed back to the car. It was back at the car that we noticed the black spots on our feet. Where did that mud come from and why was it moving?? As a matter of fact, why was there blood on my feet? The answer was immediately apparent to both of us. Leeches!! Now a calmer head would have pulled out some salt and applied it to the little bloodsuckers. However, even if I had a 50-pound sack of salt in the car that process would have taken too long for me. I probably had a dozen, ½ to ¾ inch leeches on each foot and Klaus had about half that many on him. Another good reason to wear closed-toed shoes while wading! After picking them off as quickly as possible we realized that the ordeal wasn't over. Our feet were still bleeding! Now the biochemist in me took over as I gazed in wonder at the tiny "springs of blood" that were sprouting from my feet and toes. Leeches produce a special protein that keeps your blood from quickly coagulating, like it would if you had a slight cut. They also release a painkiller so you can't even feel them drilling through your skin. If we could just get the dentist to use that type of painkiller! However, the biochemist part of my brain was quickly shut down, because I was still bleeding! Klaus, who has collected native fishes in more states than anyone I know, flatly stated that he had never run into leeches before. I felt bad and wondered if he would ever return to collect in Missouri again. I then wondered out-loud whether applying saliva to the bite marks would help stop the bleeding. I remember doing something like this as a teenager to help stop the bleeding from those annoying beer can tab cuts. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Klaus tried to suck on his foot.*2 No, Klaus, lick your fingers and then put it on your foot! I'm not sure if this really worked but I think Klaus would have bled or choked to death had I not been there to instruct him! Therefore it should be noted that I saved Klaus's life and should be able to have any new fishes discovered by him, named in my honor. Somehow we survived this ordeal. We were just elated that we didn't wade in up to our waists! Just think, dead car clicker, miles from nowhere and leeches hanging from your (censored)! I still shiver as I write this. We finally made it back to St. Louis and dropped by my house to check out the fishroom. We relayed our adventures to Jeannie, my wife, to gross her out. She then asked me why was there was still fresh blood on my sandals! It was then that I realized I was still bleeding! But it wasn't one of the old wounds, it was a little leech that had latched on between my toes and was attempting to bleed me dry! And this leads us to our final discovery. If you ever run into a creek full of leeches, by all means, make sure to check between your toes!

Epilogue
Too bad if you missed the wonderful talk given by Klaus Schoening to our club the Thursday evening before our adventures. He had some wonderful slides and lots of practical information about collecting native fishes. Any club that is looking for a great speaker on native fishes would be wise to seek him out. If you want to know why the Studfish was named after Charley Grimes you can ask him yourself as he will be one of our spring show speakers! For more information check out the MASI website at: www.missouriaquariumsociety.org

The Catch
Darters
Greenside, Etheostoma blennioides
Missouri Saddled, Etheostoma tetrazonum
Rainbow, Etheostoma caeruleum
Orange-throat, Etheostoma spectabile
Logperch, Percina caprodes

Sunfish
Longear sunfish - Lepomis megalotis, Bluegill - Lepomis macrochirus

Minnows
Bleeding Shiner Notropis zonatus, Southern Redbelly Dace - Phoxinus erythrogaster
Plus a bunch that were too boring to keep. Hey it was hot!

Killifish
Plains topminnow - Fundulus sciadicus
Northern Studfish or the Charley Grimes (CG) Killifish, Fundulus catenatus
Blackspotted topminnow, Fundulus olivaceus

Catfish & Others
Slender Madtom - Noturus exilis
Sculpin - Mottled Sculpin Cottus bairdi and Banded sculpin Cottus carolinae
Gambusia affinis - Mosquitofish

*1 Certainly you know this can't be true, Noel isn't that good of a shot!
*2 Certainly you know this can't be true, Klaus isn't this limber!

I was at the end of my rope with the disccus I had been trying to spawn successfully. After two and a half years of eggs being eaten, eggs not being fertilized, wigglers being eaten, parents unable to take care of their free swimming fry and a million other problems I decided to purchase some tropheus for the empty 75 gallon tank that I had one day hoped would be full of young discus.

I had always heard that tropheus were very difficult to keep and could come down with bloat or other health problems at the drop of a hat. So I was always a little leery about giving them a try but I figured no fish could be as painful as the discus that I kept so I decided to go for it and give them a try. After a little research I decided to order seventeen Tropheus moori "Moliros" from Wet Thumb Aquatics. I talked to Dolores Scherr who is the owner and she assured me with proper diet and regular water changes I would have no problems. She was extremely helpful and took lots of time to answer all my questions and I'm happy to say she was as right as she could be. That was one year ago and I still have all 17 Tropheus moliros, which now are about three inches long and are starting to get blotches of the beautiful bright red color that will eventually cover their entire bodies. They are commonly known as firecracker reds or blood red T. moliros.

Tropheus are incredibly active and interesting to watch. They dart around the tank and quarrels are common among them although a squirmish rarely ends in death.

This is my routine for Tropheus care. I feed my fish twice daily. I feed a flake called prime that I order from Wet Thumb Aquatics in the morning and a veggie flake in the evening. I also feed something called seaweed select that is made by Ocean Nutrition. It comes in sheets and you can clip a piece to a lettuce clip or my preference is to soak a small piece in water for a short time then to shake it vigoursly which causes it to break up into tiny pieces. Then I simply pour it in the tank. The fish devour it aggressively although it took about a week for them to get used to this food before they would accept it. Now, when they see it coming, they practically jump out of the tank after it.

I make a 30% weekly water change and I add 1/2 teaspoon of salt per gallon of water. I also add one teaspoon of Tanganyika buffer per ten gallons of water. This helps keep my pH between 8.2 to 8.5, which is acceptable for Tropheus. Let me say this, I surely don't claim to know everything and just because this routine works for me does not mean it will work for everyone but all my tropheus are quite healthy and I have never had a problem.

I have enjoyed my tropheus so much that I have sold all of my discus and invested that money in different varieties of Tropheus. I now have 17 T. moliros, 29 T. moori bemba orange flames, 166 Icola Kaisers, and 29 T. dubosi "Maswas". Seventeen of my Tropheus dubois "Maswas" are breeder size and I am just starting to get a few fry. The fry are gorgeous with black bodies that are covered with bluish white polka dots. I have at least two female dubois holding every week but being young and inexperienced mothers most times they do not hold their eggs for more than two or three days. But I do have 4 females that have become reliable parents so far. Tropheus females may take up to a year to become good parents. I am sure that over the next few months that I will have quite a few T. duboisi fry once my females become a little more experienced.

I hope that this information has been helpful and that it might convince a few of you to give tropheus a try. Once you do, you'll be hooked like me.

The following story relates how I got back into the aquarium hobby after a seventeen-year absence (since I was in grade school) and the lessons I have learned along the way.

My re-introduction into the fish-keeping world happened innocently enough, when I decided to ask for a mini desk tank for my 30th birthday. The family decided to improvise a little and I received a five and a half gallon rectangular tank. Since I wanted to do things the right way, I decided to check out Tropical World Pets on Watson for some advice on tank start-up. The girl at the store was very helpful and she set me up with a Whisper junior, 25-watt heater, some brown river gravel, and a few plastic plants. I also decided to get a full hood for the tank (15 inch florescent tube, 12 watt bulb). I set up the tank (filter and everything running) for a few days and purchased two feeder goldfish (the girl at the store's recommendation) to cycle the tank. After about a month, I decided to get a red-tail black shark to add to the tank. Of course all hell broke loose, as the shark delighted in chasing the goldfish around the tank. (Hint: Red-tail sharks are very territorial fish. A 5-½ gallon tank is way too small for them).

By this time the tank was cycled, and I decided to spare the goldfish further harassment. I gave them to my nephews. I decided that Tiger Barbs would be the shark's companions. I purchased 3 regular and 3 green-moss juvenile tigers. At about this time, I pulled out the plastic plants and planted a group of Hygrophila polysperma in a grove on the left side of the tank. I bought some Plant Tabs to fertilize and put the light on an inexpensive timer (12 hour cycle). To my amazement the Hygro did well. I was pruning them quite regularly and replanting the shoots. Regarding the fish, the shark now took up chasing the tiger barbs. I was very attached to the shark, since it was a fish with attitude and would come to the surface to take live bloodworms from my hand. However, I realized the tiger barb's were stressing and would have no peace. My nephew, Chuck Dyn (fellow Club member and Tropical World, Watson store, employee), had set up a 15-gallon tank and agreed to take the Red-tailed shark.

I eventually replaced the shark with two Corydoras leucomelas. The Tiger barbs did seem to settle down, but I noticed some peculiar behavior. I had placed the submersible heater, in the horizontal position, about 2 inches above the gravel bed. Every morning, as the light came on, the barbs would make a mad dash to hide under the heater. Once the tank light went off, they would swim around the middle of the tank chasing each other and cavorting like Tigers do. Although the plants loved the bright light, I had a feeling the Tiger Barbs did not.

This tank was running throughout the year and the Tigers were constantly fighting illnesses. At one point, I know some had Flukes. The barbs would dash across the front of the tank, and then stop - breathing rapidly. Some would just waste away and die. This tank was treated with Fluke Tabs, Maracin, Maracin Two, and Coppersafe at various times. Despite my disappointment in losing some of the barbs, a few of the hardier remained and the plants were doing well. So I did not give up.

Chuck and I went in together on a subscription to Aquarium Fish Magazine. It was one of the better ideas we have had. We both have learned a great deal from these publications (TFH too), and we maintain a subscription to Aquarium Fish Magazine today. The main lessons I learned from keeping the Barbs and other fish in the 5-½ gallon follows:

1: Don't overcrowd the tank like I did. 5 ½ gallons are good for Killifish or a pair of Dwarf Gourami's, but not much else. Certainly not 8 medium-size fish!

2: Barbs are schooling fish and enjoy plenty of swimming room. Keep a school of at least six fish and I would recommend no less than a 15-gallon tank for most of the medium size barbs (Tigers, Black Ruby, Gold and Rosy).

3: The smaller the tank, the more upkeep. Water evaporates quicker, filters clog faster and they need gravel vacuuming more often. 15-gallon tanks are better choices for starter tanks.

In September of '96, at Pets Mart in Maplewood, Chuck and I saw a flyer advertising MASI's fall auction. We attended the auction and liked what we saw. In February of '97 we both became members of MASI. About the same time as the fall auction, I caught a bad case of one-more-tank-itus and bought a 55-gallon tank.

At first, I had some reservations about the size of the tank and the maintenance responsibility that would go along with it. Growing up, I never had a tank bigger than 10 gallons. I truly believe that larger tanks require about the same maintenance as smaller tanks (probably even less), yet allow for more errors because of their size. Because of larger water volume, water quality will deteriorate slower in a larger tank.

Wanting to make this tank a planted tank as well, I bought Tetra Initial D and added this to the brown river gravel of the 55-gallon. Filtration consisted of a Penguin 300 outside power filter. I heat this tank with a 250 watt Acura heater. While the tank was cycling with some of the Tiger Barbs from the 5 ½ gallon upstairs, I purchased and planted 6 Cryptocorne wendtii and 3 giant Hygrophila from a mail order plant company. (Sorry Mike, I didn't know about Exotic Aquatics yet!). I upgraded my plant fertilizer to Tetra Crypto Dunger and Flora Pride. I press one-half Cypto tab into the gravel around the roots of each Cryptocorne, bi-weekly. Flora Pride liquid fertilizer is added, at the recommended dosage, every week or two. Besides the plants, the tank is accented with a series of natural rock caves along the back of the tank and 1 large vertical piece of driftwood. Gradually, I added 4 or 5 more Tiger Barbs, a Bristle-nose Pleco, and 6 Cherry Barbs. Other plant additions included Java fern and Floating Water Sprite.

Comparing the Tiger Barb's behavior in the 55 gallon and previously in the 5-½ gallon is like day and night. In the 55, there is no hiding under heaters or in the rockwork for the Barbs. They are too busy schooling, playing follow the leader, or breeding in the tank. Disease problems have been virtually non-existent in the 55 gallon, except when the author has gotten lazy with his filter maintenance (I'll save that for another article).

In summary, Tiger Barbs are a great addition to any medium (15 gallons) to large (let your wallet be your guide) tank. Keep them in a school of six or more fish and in the company of other species that share their same swimming vigor and brashness, (mild-mannered Cichlids or Tetras are not recommended tank-mates). Give the front of their tank plenty of open space for swimming and you will have many hours of enjoyment watching these dynamos perform their antics.

The spawning of different species of Synodontis catfish used to be quite rare a few years ago. With in the last few years more and more people are having great deals of success breeding different Synodontis catfish. There is a wide variety of these catfish available throughout the hobby. Some are rare and more expensive than the others. They also come in different sizes. Some can exceed several feet in length while others only reach a few inches. Thus bringing us to the Synodontis petricola. The Synodontis petricola comes from Lake Tanganyka in Africa. This species will only reach about three to four inches long. Some people believe that this is a dwarf species of Synodontis but since I have not seen or heard of any larger Synodontis petricola. I do not call them a dwarf species.

There have been a few reports on different ways of spawning Synodontis catfish. One way is to use some sort of host fish. Just like the S. multipunctatus the Synodontis petricola can and have been spawned using this method. Although we have not had any success with a host fish, we were able to breed them a different way. In order to do this all you need is a large flowerpot, a clear plastic bowl (2 - 3 inches tall) and some blue or black marbles. Darker the marbles the better, black is the best for this. On the plastic bowl make sure when you turn your flowerpot upside down over it so it fits firmly. You do not want to have to big of a gap between the bowl and the sides of the pot. To set it up fill the bowl up with the marbles, be sure to fill it so the marbles are slightly higher than the bowl. With the flowerpot make a large enough hole so the Syno's can swim in and out. It works best if you do this on the top of the pot. After you have did this invert the flowerpot over the bowl with marbles in it. If you can it is best if you have two of these made so you can swap them out when checking for eggs. Once you have conditioned your fish for spawning then put this in the tank. It will be used for the spawning site. Conditioning Synodontis petricola for breeding is fairly easy. From the research we gathered when we bought our Synodontis petricola, we have learned that live black worms works the best. We have feed them other food such as flake and frozen. Although they accepted the flake and frozen foods, they did not relish it. Our conditioning program consists of live black worms in the morning and at night while feeding Spirulina flake in the afternoon. Also three times a week, I would substitute live white worms for the black worms. They like the white worm as much as they did the black worm. You can find the live black worm at some of your local petshops.

Water chemistry is not a real big deal. Synodontis can live in almost anything as long as the change is not too drastic. Since the Synodontis petricola's come from Lake Tanganyka, they thrive when you mock their natural habitat. Personally I try and keep the ph somewhere between 8.3 to 9.0. Keep the temperature set at 82 degrees. I do a 50 % water change every 7 to 10 days. I had these Petricola in a 75-gallon tank. The tank it self was bare bottom with only a whisper three for filtration. In the daytime the tank would get a lot of sunlight and the Syno's would not come out of hidding at all during this time. Not even for some of their favorite food. At night I would leave the light off on the tank. I could still see them pacing the bottom in search for any food.

Now that you have everything, it is time to try and breed the Synodontis petricola. First thing you want to do is condition your fish. You'll notice when they are ready by looking at the female. In the females mid section you'll notice that at spawning time it will become swollen with eggs. I also noticed that when the female is ready, the male has become slightly aggressive towards her. As soon as they are ready, place the flowerpot with the marbles in the tank. You will have to keep a close eye on the tank. Since you can't see through the pot, you will have to know when to pull the bowl of marbles out. This is why I have two bowls of marbles in it. When I need to check I just pull it out and stick the new one in. Because the Syno's are spending a lot of time in the pot, the bowl gets real dirty so I was changing the bowls out twice a day.

When the spawning process began I was lucky enough o be home at the time. I was getting ready to feed the Syno's when I noticed that all of the catfish were in the pot. I grabbed a flashlight and shined it in the pot and I could see some eggs floating down towards the marbles. Both male and female will swim in circles around the inside of the pot. As they swim around it sort of creates a whirlpool. As the eggs are laid the male is releasing his sperm at the same time and the movement of the water forces most of the eggs as well as the sperm to the center. Eggs from the first spawn that were in the center of the bowl were all fertile. The ones that ended up around the outside (towards the walls of the bowl) only about 30 % hatched out. Synodontis petricola eggs hatch out in about 48 to 78 hours. From my first spawn I had over 200 eggs. I placed all of them into egg tumblers. Unlike the S. Multi, Synodontis petricola fry grow rather slowly. I had some S. Multi fry that were only one month old that were twice as big as the Synodontis petricola at four months of age. From what I know the Synodontis petricola will only reach about ¾ to an inche in the first year. It might seem a long time to raise a fish but keep in mind they only reach 3 to 4 inches. I separated the fry into 3 different 5-gallon tanks. They were feed a variety of foods. I feed them newly hatched brine shrimp as well as frozen brine. I also feed them with some microworms and some spirulina flake. I tried to use Cyclopes which is very high in protein, but the food floats on the surface and most of the catfish stay at the bottom or hiding by the sponge filter. The baby catfish have healthy appetites, so I was feeding them 4 to 5 times a day. Every 5th day I would replace half the water. To see a lot of Synodontis swimming all over the tank in a big school is really a site to see. If you ever get the chance to breed any Synodontis catfish you will enjoy it very much. Just remember to do you water changes.

We would like to thank Gerald Miranda of the Rhode Island Aquarium Society for his help on caring and breeding the Synodontis petricola.

Over the past few years Catfish have been becoming more and more popular. One of the reasons is there is more information being released on spawning these wonderful creatures. There are thousands of different species available throughout the hobby. Some of the more popular types come from Africa. Synodontis is one that is found in lakes and slow moving streams. Some of Synodontis reach only a few inches in length, while others can exceed several feet. They are distinguished from each other by the shape of their mouth, the number of fin rays (anal and pectoral), teeth, eyes, color and so on.

Synodontis are onmivorous creatures. They feed on all sorts of meaty food as well as plant material. All of the Synodontis I have had readily accepted frozen food I offered. I also feed them some sort of spirulina or algae flake. Almost all of the species are said to be nocturnal. They hide by day and search for food at night. The ones I have will come out at daytime but any sudden movement and they will dart into a flowerpot or anything to hide under.

These particular type of catfish are very hardy. They can withstand a wide range of water chemistry. Just as long as any extremes are avoided. Some species can live in a ph level of 6.5 to 7.5 while the rift lake catfish need a ph level of 8.0 to 8.5 Temperature could be between 21 to 29 C. There are no special requirements for filtration. As long as you do your water changes, Synodontis are fairly easy to keep. Make sure you have a tank sizable for the species you want to keep.

The Synodontis multipunctatus are also known as Cuckoo Catfish. They received this name when it was discovered that they use mouth brooding cichlids as a host for their eggs to hatch. S. multipunctatus are fairly easy to spawn. It is hard to find fully mature adults to do so. We were able to acquire a trio of Multi's from Chad Christen. He has been spawning them for a while now. Between reading different books, articles and picking Chad's brain, we also have been able to spawn them.

Once we received our trio, we then placed them into a 90-gallon tank. We used Haplochromis sauvaei as the host fish. The tank set up was simple. We only put three Terre Cotta Caves in tank. The catfish took to them rather quickly. After a couple of weeks went by, the fish were now accustom to their new home. We feed them heavy doses of meaty foods to condition the females to spawn. It also helps out the host fish. Without a good host fish, you will not get babies.

The time was close as we noticed that the male Haplochromis sauvagei was trying to entice the females to breed. Once this happens, the male S. multi will patrol around and investigate the breeding attempts by the Haps. If it appears it is going to happen, the male will then go and get the female. At this time the female will exit her cave to take a quick look for herself. If she does not feel it is going to happen, she will go back into her cave to hide. If she feels like it is going to happen, the male will chase her around the tank until the host fish starts the spawning process. Just as the host female lay her eggs, the multi's will rush in often eating the Hap. Egg and at the same time release her eggs while the male fertilizes it. When this is done the female host will think it is her eggs, so she will pick it up to mouthbreed. This whole process can be lengthy because when the catfish come in the host male will often try to chase them away.

After the breeding has occurred the S. Multipunctatus eggs will begin to hatch out in about 48 to 72 hours. Later the Multi eggs develop quicker than that of the Haplochromis. After 72 hours, the Syno's are ready to eat. They will start eating the undeveloped Haplochromis eggs one by one. If they are not stripped by this point, some will even turn on themselves. Our first spawn produced 14 Multi Fry. We feed them a wide variety of frozen Brine shrimp. We started with baby Brine but after a month we started to feed adult Brine and some chopped up bloodworms. They seem to always be hungry. Several feedings a day may be required to meet their needs. With a good diet and water changes our newly hatched Synodontis reached ½ inch in about 2 months. At this rate it won't be long before these guys are producing young for themselves.

The Pseudosphromenus dayi is a very interesting fish that comes from Southeast Asia. It is stated that the natural habitat of the dayi is the coastal lowlands of the Coromandel coastline in southeast India and the coast region of west Malaya. The body of the dayi is light brown. The fins are a light red with blue on the edges. The fish get to be about 3 inches. The males are supposed to have more pointed and long dorsal, anal, and caudal fins. I do not think that my fish have read the book yet, because I cannot tell them apart unless they are breeding.

Mike Hellweg and I where at Beldts when we found these fish, of course we both could not leave with purchasing some. When I got my six home, I put them into a 20 long. The tank was kept at 80. The fish were fed twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. The morning feeds are usually fake food and the evening feed are either frozen brine shrimp or flake food. The surface of the aquarium is covered with water sprite and java moss and a couple crypts in pots on the bottom of the tank.

I asked Mike how to breed these fish and he told me that they usually spawn in caves. So I then added a couple of caves to the aquarium. I also started feeding live white worms and grindle worms. I also increased the temperature to 82°. I noticed the females starting to get round bellies. Then one day I noticed a male in one of the caves. When I feed them and he came out to eat I could see his throat had turned bright red. The male did not stay out to eat long. He quickly returned to the cave. If another fish came too close to the cave he would come out to drive the intruder away. I could not stand the wait any longer. I took a flashlight and shined it up into the cave. There I saw the bubble nest the male had built in the top of the cave. I could also see the small white eggs. In about three days I could see the fry falling out of the nest. The male would catch the fry and blow them back into the nest. I then decided to move the fry to another tank. This was easy to do all I had to do was place my thumb over the opening of the cave and move it to the new tank. After I moved the cave I quickly caught the male and returned him to the tank with the others. The next day the fry, about 20 of them, where free swimming. I feed the fry live baby brine shrimp. I still lost most of the fry.

This process continued for about three spawnings. I then starting reading up on the dayi again and discovered that the fry are too small to eat baby brine shrimp. I found out that they need green water to survive. I had a 5 gal tank that had turn green on me so the next time I got a spawn I moved the fry to the green water tank. After two or three days the fry where still doing fine. Then after a week I was noticing that I did not have as many fry. After looking closer at the tank I discovered that I had a nice collection of hydra in the tank. The only problem with hydra is they feed on fry. I treated the tank to remove the hydra, but it was too late. I had once again lost most of the fry.

By now I was getting discoursed about ever raising any quantity of fry. But, on my 5th spawning I would have better luck. After the fry had hatched out I moved them to a 5 gal tank with a good covering of water sprite. I also started out feeding APR, Artificial Powered Rotifers. You just mix a small portion with water and feed it to your fry. You have to be careful not to overfeed or you will pollute the tank and kill the fry. I did put some snails in the tank to help clean up the excess APR. After about two weeks on APR I started feeding live brine shrimp. This was the most successful method for me; I was able to raise about 20 fry.

After I had tried all these different ways to raise dayi fry, I discovered that I had about 5 or 6 baby dayi in the aquarium with the breeders. Just goes to show you that you never know what is going to happen when you raise fish. So if you are looking for an interesting fish to try to breed they I would suggest Pseudosphromenus dayi.

We have no problems getting through the Mexican border, a lady from the fishing lodge meets us and fills out all of the needed paperwork to get through customs quickly and are on our way to Presa de las Adjuntas or Presa Vicente Guerrero, depending on which map you look at, (a large lake) which is close to the Ciudad Victoria in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. This lake is in the Rio Soto la Marina river system. In Mexico the exchange rate is currently 8.25 Peso's to one US Dollar. Our first collection site is at a small river located on highway 180 (at the 126 1/2 kilometer marker) close to the Tropic of Cancer. We find some turtles, sunfish, Gambusia, and Mexican tetras. NO CICHLIDS! We head into the city of Tampico to spend the night. Tampico is a modern day city with a population on about a half a million. We stay at the Monte Carlo Hotel, a modern hotel that is expensive for this part of Mexico at $30.00 a night. We eat dinner at a fast food pollo (chicken) restaurant close to the hotel and then go to a couple of the local nightspots to enhance our knowledge about the Mexican culture. One thing I found out about Mexico is that there is only ONE brand of gasoline. PEMEX. PEMEX is state owned and is the only gas station you will find in Mexico.

Mexico was not how I pictured it. I thought we would be driving through a Desert. Their were some cactus along the way but most of the landscape was gently rolling with a lot of vegetation. We passed many small rivers and lakes. They did have road blocks set up every so often, checking the paperwork of the cars and searching some vehicles for drugs, guns or other illegal items. Mexico had a lot of police cars but they did not seem to care about how you drove. One thing that bothered me, until I found out why, was that whenever I went to pass someone, they would turn on their left blinker. I would slow down and they would not turn. After several times doing this (and cussing out the driver in front of me) I figured out that when they put their left blinker on, they were signaling me that it is OK to pass!

The next day we head out of Tampico to collect at a couple of sites. Our main interest is a waterfall in the Panuco River system. We stop by a ditch just east of Los Luises on Highway 70 which is between Ebano and Altamirano and collect. We find some Mexican tetras (that their body shape is a little different than the normal tetras we usually find), some beautifully colored mollies, a Nandopsis species, several Herichthys species and A LOT of Tilapia! We pack up and head off toward San Luis Potosi. We find a small waterfall that is in a very beautiful spot but it is not tall waterfall that we are looking for. Next to the waterfall is a hydroelectric plant (a 6 foot round pipe that the water comes down and enters a building, then it goes through some type of turbines to make electric) The water was fast flowing, clear and cool. It appeared that the only fish there were some tetras and a livebearer. There are quite a number of tourists visiting to see these beautiful little waterfalls. We leave and head toward San Louis Potosi. We stop at the Santa Anita river, 20 kilometers west of Valles and collect some swordtails, I didn't see any cichlids. We talk to some guy who is there washing his car and he gives us the directions to the larger waterfall that we have been looking for. By this time it is too late to go to the waterfall and/or collect so we head into the city of Valles to spend the night. We go to a couple watering hole to taste the local cuisine and try the local drinks.

The next morning we head out toward the waterfall. We leave the paved road and travel 30 kilometers up a valley that is planted with sugar cane. The road is rough but the scenery is beautiful. At one point Rusty and I get out of the car and move rocks out of the road so Charlie can drive without to much trouble. Next we have to go down a hillside (on what seems to be a narrow cow path that is on a steep hill), opening and closing barbed wire cattle gates, with rocks the size of bowling balls on the road, to get to the area where the waterfall is said to be. When we get to where the waterfall is suppose to be, we find out that we have to paddle three hours, upstream to get to it! We decide to go ahead (we went this far) and go there. Rusty works out the financial details with a canoe owner and he gets in the front of the canoe, Charlie is next, then me and the canoe driver. We all paddle and make it in two and a half hours. Several times we have to get out and walk while the guide pulls the canoe through some rapids. Along the way we see several smaller waterfalls that are very beautiful. When we reach the Waterfall named "Tamul" we have to climb up a rock mountainside and walk about half a mile to see this wonderful part of nature. The area on the way to and around the waterfall is very tropical.

After looking at it and taking a few pictures, we snorkel around and see a few livebearers. We get back in the canoe and head back down stream. On our way back we noticed several trout lines. The guide said they catch large fish (he didn't know what type) but won't let us pull one up to see what they are. We stop at a large cave that has a pond in it, but do not see any fish in it. It only takes us forty-five minutes to go downstream and get back to the landing area. When we get back to the car, we load up, follow the cow path back up the hillside and go to an area where we can collect in the river. We collect at a low water bridge, right next to a ferry that is sitting fifty feet from the water (the bridge looked fairly new) and not is use any more.

The river (they call Gallenas) is shallow, wide and clear. We collect several cichlids (that appear to be a new type of Herichthys), a Nandopsis type, a few liverbearers and a lot of tadpoles that we do not keep. It starts to get dark so we head out to meet up with Rusty's dad at the Lake. We get to the lake at 1:30 AM.

We spend the night at the lake (Rusty sleeps in one of the motor homes, I sleep in the back of a pickup truck, I was very comfortable, and Charlie sleeps in the car with his feet hanging out of it. He said he was not comfortable!) and the next morning Rusty and I walk down another cow trail (it is a real cow trail, you have to watch your step!) to get to the lake. The lake is made from the Rio Soto la Marina river, it is suppose to have Xiphophorus xiphidium (the spike tail sword) in it. When we get to the lake we don't find any fish. The only thing there is largemouth bass. Rusty's dad has been coming to the lake for years, they use to catch large Herichthys carpinte on hook and line but now only catch bass. The lake has dropped twenty feet over the last ten years. Rusty's dad and his friends said they have been averaging six to seven pound fish with the largest being fourteen pounds! This area used to have several livebearers and Herichthys carpinte in it, but it appears that the bass have eaten everything up. When we get back to the car, I find out (and I was wearing a swimsuit) that the cow trail was full of chiggers. Their not there anymore, they are all on me!

One thing I learned in Mexico and I thought was interesting is that they burn the sugar cane fields at night (all that is left is the stalk) so they can cool down for the next day's harvest. They then cut the cane by hand and stack it as high as possible on trucks. All this is done by hand! They said the reason they burn the fields is that it makes the sugar sweeter. You have to be careful when you see a sugar cane truck driving, if they are going the same way you are, you have to be careful of the dust and falling cane, if they are going in the opposite direction, they take their part of the road out of the middle!

As Rusty stays at the lake with his dad, Charlie and I head south toward Guatemala. The Mexican roads seem to be pretty good, there are not as many road blocks as there are in Honduras. The one item that you need to pay attention to is when you get to any small town, they have "totes" in the road. Totes are a type of speed bump, a very large speed bump. You WILL slow down for them if you don't want to hit your head on the ceiling and replace your tires. All the main roads in Mexico seem to be pretty good to drive on, we take a lot of toll roads and they are great, smooth, hardly any traffic and you can zip through at a very fast pace. Throughout Mexico, the way they get rid of trash if haul it to dumps and when the dump start getting full, they burn it! They burn the whole dump!

When we get to the city of Veracruz, I get lost (It seems like anywhere in Mexico & Central America, they have very few signs. You have to watch for your sign and if you don't see it, stay on the road until you come to it. It may be fifty miles down the road but there will be one there.), at a stop light a police car pulls up next to us and I ask for directions. They do not speak any English except for "Follow Me", so I follow them to some guys house who speaks English. While Charlie is getting directions, I get everyone a Coke and they decide to lead us out of town to the correct road. They turn on their flashing lights and give us a twenty-minute police escort through town doing fifty-five miles an hour until we get back on the correct road. Where else in the world can you get a police escort for a couple of Cokes?

From Veracruz, we head southwest through the Mexican state of Chiapas toward Guatemala. We stop at some Mayan Ruins named Izapa and take pictures and tour them. A little while later in southern Chiapas we go through a road block and I ask Charlie to pull over so I can get some pictures. The road block had a lot of soldiers, sand bags stacked about five feet high and machine guns mounted on top of them. I take several pictures, get into the car and several Army soldiers come running over yelling something at us in Spanish. They tell me that they want my camera's. I told them no and after a short discussion I give them the rolls of film out of my two camera's and they let us get on our way.

We cross into Guatemala at Talisman on the Mexican side and El Carmen on the Guatemala side. On the Guatemala side of the border, there is a large parking lot with a lot of American cars (with American license plates) in a parking lot, covered with dust and they all have some numbers painted on the windshields. Most of the cars are newer looking luxury cars. It takes a couple hours to get all our papers approved, passports stamped and the car fumigated then we are on our way again. We head toward the Capital named Guatemala City. Guatemala is a very hilly country. I see more trucks (most with sugar cane on them) than I have seen anyplace else. The trucks appeared to outnumber the cars four to one! Charlie seems to have a lot of fun passing the trucks, and the worse the curves in the road are the more he like to try and pass them. He must have passed three hundred trucks in Guatemala and just about everyone of them were on a sharp turn! I counted over 200 sugar cane truck, full to the brim with sugar cane, in front of one factory we passed! In Guatemala the exchange rate is 6.08 Quetzales to each US Dollar.

Our next collection spot is forty-eight kilometers east of Puerto Barrios in a creek that is a tributary of the Rio Amates. We collect several types of livebearers, (I am looking for the Merry Widow but do not find any) see several cichlids but are unable to collect them. We spend the night in Puerto Barrios sampling the local drinks and the next morning head toward Chiquimula and Copan. We stop at the Mayan ruins of Quirigua which have some unique stone carvings. Back about 700 BC the Quirigua (a smaller group of people) kidnapped the ruler of Copan and beheaded him. We leave the ruins and head toward Copan.

The road to Honduras from Guatemala is a gravel road that is 70 kilometers long. it starts in Chiquimula, Guatemala and ends in Copan, Honduras. We get there at 10:00 AM but are unable to proceed due to road construction. They closed the road for construction (a landslide messed up the road and only one lane is open) but say they will re-open it at 3:00 PM. We collect in the river at Chiquimula for several hours, find three types of livebearers and a couple cichlids. Our car was first in line but when we get back into line there are twenty or more cars ahead of us. At 3:00 the road opens, Charlie is worried about making it to the border before it closes for the evening so he makes a mad dash, passing everything on this dirt/gravel road and we make the border before nightfall. It is possible to get stuck at the border if they close for the evening, you can even get stuck between the two countries if you get through one and not the other. From Copan we head to San Pedro Sula where we eat dinner at a roadside chicken joint and keep driving through the night until we get to La Ceiba. All through Central America it is common to see a truck, bus or car, drive into a creek or river and then they would splash water on the vehicles and wash them right in the middle of the river! It was also common place to see clothes being washed in the river and then spread out the shore on top of rocks to dry.

La Ceiba, Honduras is our final destination, at the Partenon Beach Hotel where we set up our coolers, put air to the fish and go on a daily basis to the Jutiapa river system. We see several old friends that Rusty, Charlie and I have met over the last few years and get reacquainted. Besides the new species at the waterfall in Tamul, Mexico, the fish in the Jutiapa river system, specifically Theraps wesseli, is our main pursuit. We spend several days trying to catch the elusive Theraps wesseli without much luck. We then try to catch them at night. We have so much success over the next several nights that we end up with one hundred and fifty fish! Charlie could hardly believe it, he said the most they have ever caught is six fish! We even catch a couple very large (seven and a half inch) males. We let seventy fish go (we got carried away collecting them) and keep about eighty fish. One day on a trip to Jutiapa, a boy was selling a four foot Iguana on the side of the road. We stop and it was alive so we buy it for 80 Lempira (In Honduras, 1 US Dollar is equal to 13.20 Lempira this year) so it is about $6.40 US Dollars. We take the Iguana back to the hotel and have one of the old ladies clean and cook it for us. NO, it does not taste like chicken, it taste a lot like pork! It is, however, boney like a fish.

We collect in the Rio Donata river (where I caught some Poecilia orri last year) and collect several types of livebearers including a type of pike livebearer. All around us at just about every collecting location, ladies are doing their laundry in the river, people are bathing themselves (with their clothes on) and washing their car/truck/bus in the river.

One other exciting thing happened in Honduras. The day after we got there, there was a prison break about a mile from the hotel. Two hundred sixty five prisoners escaped. They caught seventy that night, killed three and the rest were at large. They had a lot of extra police, army soldiers and special forces (people in camouflaged outfits with a hooded mask, only showing their eyes) out on the streets looking for the escapees. The army and special forces people were riding around in pickup trucks with six to eight machine gun carrying guys in the back of the pickups, checking cars, trucks and peoples papers. They never did stop me or Charlie, they must have thought us "gringo's" were not escapees.

One of the bar/restaurant (Ex Patriots) owners in La Ceiba (Mark) who happens to be a Canadian had an attempted hold up at his establishment. The robber killed his security guard, went in to rob him. Mark would not give him any money, the guy threatened Mark and Mark beat him up with a baseball bat. The police took both of them to jail. Mark was let out several days later. The robber was kept in jail. In Honduras, if you go to jail, all inmates (male and female) are put into the same, large room. If you eat, someone has to bring you the food! If no one brings you anything, you go without eating. If there is a killing, they normally put everyone involved in jail until they straighten it out, then the innocent ones are let go. A fisherman at one of the bars said that he caught a 19' great white shark about a mile off the shore and just a few hundred feet off shore, a friend of his speared a 6 1/2' shark. Every day we saw hundreds of fisherman just off shore in little dug out canoe's fishing.

Gasoline throughout Mexico and Central America seemed to be $2.00 to $3.00 a gallon. We did not have any trouble with the gas. We had minor trouble with the car but nothing Charlie couldn't handle.

We collected several types of unknown livebearers, a Belonesox species, some Gambusia species, several Poecilia species (including Poecilia mexicana and Poecilia sphenops), one Heterandria species, Poeciliopsis gracilis, Alfaro huberi, a couple Xiphophorus species, some tetras, some gobies, Archocentrus spilurum, Archocentrus cutteri, Theraps wesseli, Amphilophus robertsoni, a couple Herichthys species, and one Nandopsis species. I'm not sure what all the livebearers are, but over time, I hope to find out. At one house, next to the Jutiapa River, the people had a Kutamundo tied to a tree as a pet. A Kutamundo is a central American raccoon. It looks like a cross between a monkey, raccoon and a lemur.

One of the many joys of collecting (besides the fish) is enjoying the beauty of the surroundings and the hospitality of the people. The Central American people always seem happy and your time there goes by very quickly. Another benefit to collecting is not having any phone calls, appointments or schedules that you have to keep!

Charlie took me to the airport Friday morning so that I could catch my fight home (luckily there was no rain, the plane's don't fly when it is raining) and I left on time. At the airport in La Ceiba, they had clocks with times of London, New York, Tokyo and La Ceiba. the funny thing was that the times were something like: London 9:30, New York 6:15, Tokyo 2:47 and La Ceiba 7:20! I had a seven hour layover in New Orleans (the airport was wild, it was Mardi Gras time). This was the first time that I had customs open my cooler and look in it, but everything was OK except for a couple of dead fish. I lost a few livebearers, most of the Amphilophus robertsoni, and most of the Theraps wesseli and I attribute it mostly to the long layover.

On the plan flight home, the guy sitting next to me (it was a full flight and we were crowded) was a six foot, eight inch, four hundred pound Hells Angel. He was going from Mardi Gras to a motorcycle show in Indianapolis. He told me his life story, the most recent happening was the "Fed's" confiscated his motorcycle shop and everything he has and are trying to prosecute him on racketeering charges. He thought that I was an undercover cop because I had headphones on and kept watching his rowdy group. He told me his friends (who were scattered throughout the plane) were a little nervous when we sat next to each other. He had a lot of interesting stories.

All in all I had a great time on this years trip, we had very little problems and special thanks go to Charlie (for taking his car on this expedition and many other things) and Rusty. From the time we left my house until the time we reached the Partenon Beach Hotel, we drove four thousand one hundred miles! The trip was well worth it and I learned a lot. I don't know if it was the cooking or the drinking but I gained 10 pounds on this trip! I hope to lose it before my next adventure.

The primary considerations are the container, the raising medium, the food and the maintenance temperature. Let me mention the temperature first since this is very important to the successful raising of white worms:

I have experiences the greatest success raising these worms at a temperature of no more than sixty degrees F. I keep the raising container in a small refrigerator turned up to the highest level possible without turning it off. This setting usually produces a temperature of around sixty degrees. Another trick hat I learned from Ralph Wilhelm and from Charles Harrison is to keep the worm containers in a covered styro box with a cut off soda bottle filled with ice. Each day, the bottle, with melted ice, is returned to the freezer and a new bottle is taken from the freezer and placed between the containers in the styro. This achieves the same cool temperature as refrigeration.

For a medium, I use African Violet Potting Soil and a boiled peat moss in equal amounts and keep this medium moderately moist. This I place in a wooden box that measures twelve inches by ten inches. I add the worms, and on top of the peat moss I lay a piece of bread which I have soaked in a yeast/water mixture, after having first removed the crust. On top of the yeast soaked bread, I lay a piece of plate glass and then place the container in the refrigerator.

When a culture is first established, it needs to be checked every few days to make sure that the bread is not souring. As the bread disappears, it is replaced by a new slice of bread. This culture requires patience, since it takes about four weeks for it to develop to the point where it can be harvested. Generally when a full slice of bread disappears entirely in two days, the worms are ready to be harvested.

Harvesting the worms is accomplished by washing off the glass plate into a clean container of water. The worms are then fed with a baster. Be careful to feed this food no more than twice a week since it is a very fatty worm, and causes fatty buildup on the fish. My killifish love this live food, and would eat it constantly if given the chance.

A culture of white worms, if kept at the correct temperature, maintained in clean medium, and fed well without being overfed (be careful to remove uneaten bread when it starts to go bad) should continue to produce for six months before the medium starts to go bad, and the worms have to be re--potted in a new container with new medium.

Like fruit flies, which were the subject of my last live food article, I generally maintain a good supply of white worms, and would be pleased to help you with a started culture if you would like to give this live food a try.

Dwarf redworms are a worm from Africa that makes an excellent fish food. They are easy to take care of and they reproduce quickly. The first thing you need are about 6 to 10 adult worms. The next thing you need is a container to raise them in; I use a Styrofoam fish box. Once you have your container you will need a median for your worms to live in. I use Magic Worm Bedding but, you can use potting soil as long as it does not have any insecticides in it. You will need to add enough water to make the soil moist but not overly wet. The way you can tell if you have the right consistency is to grab a handful of soil and squeeze. If when you squeeze water comes out you have your soil too wet and you need to add some soil. If when you squeeze and no water comes out but when you open your hand the soil falls apart. Your soil is too dry; you need to add water until the soil stays balled together then you open your hand. When you have your soil at the right consistency you can add your worms. It is important that you keep your soil at this consistency so you need to check it once in a while.

After put your worms in you will need to feed them. I feed mine oats. I mix the oat with water and let the mixture sit for about 10 minutes; this allows the oats to absorb the water. You don't have to feed oats they will eat about anything bread, oatmeal, table scraps, etc. When I feed I dig a trough in the center of the soil to put the food. I then cover it with soil.

The worms are very easy to find just look where you put the food. They will usually be in a large ball. You just pick out the ones you what to feed to your fishes. The small worms will be about an inch long while the larger ones will be about 3 inches long. The really small ones will be less than an inch and they will be white, so don't think you have some type of invasion when you see these little white things in your culture. Also if you look really closely in your culture you should be able to find something that look like an apple seed only larger. Those things are egg sacks.

So if you're looking for something different to feed your fish I suggest you try red worms.