Forest still-water fishes in Southwestern Sri Lanka

 A colleague in Sri Lanka is asking questions about wild-type Cherry Barbs (Puntius titteya) which would involve my doing Inferential Statistics-based choice experiments with adult pairs in aquaria. 

I was able to get seven males from a reputable breeder, here are two in a holding tank:

Now I've got to get some healthy females. 

We also keep Dart Frogs, freshwater turtles, and manage an arid terrarium.

 

                                              Here are some closeups of our desert terrarium

                                                UPPER Our Blue Death Feigning Beetle enjoying apple

                                                LOWER   A plastic Tortoise from the grandkid's toybox

                                             with live Hens and Chicks plants in the Desert Terrarium

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            Next some shots of our Dart Frogs Dendrobates leucomeles in the Rainforest Terrarium. We raised them from Tadpoles.

Susan provided many of the plants and logs: Pothos, Aucuba, Bamboo, etc. The Monstera is purchased.

Links for my kids to my Flickr photos and a brief bio

 Hi guys. Grandpa has extra photos and a few videos on his Flickr account. They are here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/chuck_smart/

At the beginning is a brief sketch of a few life events, which I copy below:

Hello, I'm a geologist. I've been married to my wife Susan for 53+ years. We have two grown sons, both married to great young women. We have two grandsons and three granddaughters.

I grew up in Stirling and Millington, New Jersey, USA. USMC 1 1/2 tours RVN March 66 to October 67. While on active duty I visited, besides Vietnam, Oahu, Hong Kong and Okinawa.

 

In Stirling we lived 100 meters from what is now the southern edge of the Great Swamp NWR managed area. Then it was our friends' farms.

 

My parents, Lou and Peg Smart, were very active in saving the Great Swamp. My Dad, my brothers and I used to pole our Arkansas Traveler boat all through it. My Mom was in charge of finding us with the station wagon when it got dark.

  

While a geology undergraduate at Rutgers, a feud broke out between two assistant professors up for the same tenure track. One left, the other was fired. Since both were my student job employers, I had to look for a new job. My paleontology professors, Steve Fox and Dick Olsson, gave me a job counting Foraminifera, tiny fossils. Since I was entering my senior year and the paleontologists and sedimentary geologists were the only ones left to recommend me, I applied to Harvard and Princeton Graduate Schools as a paleontologist, and wrote my Senior Henry Rutgers thesis on Eurypterids. During that year I also took courses in Vertebrate Anatomy and Physiology from Nathan Hart, the great developmental biologist. Combined with the engineering courses I took (I have an extra BS Mech E from Rutgers), I had a rare combination of skills, and Princeton and Harvard offered me exactly the same support, to the dollar.

 

In graduate school at Princeton I was privileged to take Biology classes from Tom Sanders (Genetics) and Robert MacArthur, John Terborgh, and John Endler (Ecology and Evolution) , and to do paleontology field work in Kenya and Ethiopia. My wife and I traveled through Africa, India, Europe, and the Caribbean. While at Princeton I worked as a teaching assistant for Al Fischer, the great invertebrate paleontologist.

 

After Princeton I went to Harvard, where I lectured on Circulatory Physics, essentially teaching future surgeons the consequences of changes to arteries and veins. My lectures were very popular. While reprising my lectures at the University 0f Chicago, I got a job offer from the University of Illinois Medical School teaching A & P, but instead moved to Ethiopia and found Bodo Man, and important human fossil.

 

I spent much of my career at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. I worked for Tom Uzzell and for Frank Gill, and knew Andy Mack and Mark Robbins. Our two sons went with us during field seasons.

 

I recently retired (the second time) as a geology professor from Kean University in New Jersey, but along the way have worked in the Oil Industry (for Shell Exploration, Cities Service, and as a geophysics contractor for Conoco) and have consulted for the Mining Industry (Amax, Alcoa). Besides Europe and Africa, we also worked throughout Asia, the Caribbean, Northern South America, India, the South Pacific, and nearly every state in the union. We have never been to Australia or Antarctica; maybe next year.

Getting ready for the cooler weather in 2020

Crossing the Awash River at Gewani

Those were the days. Meanwhile, in 2020, Sue and I are stuck at home.
With the high temperatures in our basement hatchery this summer,

83.5F in the fishroom

we postponed the resumption of managed killifish egg production.   Mops were present to protect the females, so a few juveniles appeared in the tanks without any effort by us.

Young male STR just coloring up

We were not picking eggs from mops or harvesting egg-laden peat, but, for example, seventeen STR hatched with their parents and are now coloring up.

We don't keep much diversity these days, just the kid's and grandkid's favorites STR, GAR, AUS and our project fish for 2020 WAL, plus prior project leftovers  SPP, and AMI.

Upper row from  left: Aphyosemion striatum juvenile, Fundulopanchax gardneri Rayfield, A. australe

                Second row from left: Fp. walkeri GH2 Kutunse, A. splendopleure Tiko Green, Fp. amieti.

We also keep two forms of  Blue Gularis SJO, Niger Delta shown below, and Red Dwarf.

Now it is July. With the cooler weather approaching, it's time to get ready. Tanks are being scrubbed with 135F hot water. That's the setting for our hot water heater! 

Clean tanks get a temporary box filter with homemade peat pillow, a boiled mop, and a planning label.

Plants (java moss, water sprite, water hyacinth) are being divided and grown out in waste tank water (for the nitrogen) with plenty of light and a little sugar (for the CO2). The plants will be transferred to shallow rearing dishes for sheltering and feeding the fry.

Plant grow out tanks

We have begun to condition the breeders with more live foods, mostly brine shrimp and  flightless Drosophila melanogaster. We will add small grindal worms as the cool weather arrives.

Harvesting Brine Shrimp

We purchase one culture of flightless Drosophila, then make new cultures using kitchen ingredients (dried potatoes, dried milk and sugar)  mixed with vinegar and water. We put the medium in deli containers with some excelsior. The flies mate and produce more flies.

We also provide infusoria,  microworms, banana worms, and walter worms for the fry.

Killifish Breeding: Fundulopanchax walkeri GH2 Kutunse, our 2020 Project Fish

Here is a school of Fundulopanchax walkeri GH2 Kutunse, our 2020 project species. Of course we also raise other species, those that are favorites of our kids and grandkids.

In the tank shown are fish we hatched in August of 2019. Now at eight months they are colored up and will begin serious egg production this summer.

YOU MUST CLICK TO WATCH ON MY YOUTUBE PAGE FOR REASONS I DON'T UNDERSTAND

Kutunse is a neighborhood north of Accra, the capital of Ghana, near the coast. Urban sprawl has threatened the Kutunse population,

Their original habitat was coastal forest, so they used to have shade. We try to duplicate their original habitat by providing a dark aquarium with a heavy cover of surface plants, a little salt in the water, and a peat substrate for tannins and a place to lay eggs. Fp.walkeri will tolerate schools if they are all about the same size.


The IUCN reviewed the entire species in 2006 and declared it NEAR THREATENED
IUCN Redlist for Fp.walkeri

Additional information for this and other known populations of Fundulopanchax walkeri is on the American Killifish Association website: https://www.wak.aka.org/Ref_Library/Fundulopanchax/Fp.walkeri.htm   

Killifish Breeding : Making a species-specific water plan

There is little point in attempting the breeding  of difficult species without knowledge of their home waters. For example, consider  two of the killifish species we will  raise this year.

1. AMI The first  species is Fundulopanchax amieti from Gerald Lofstead. It has a reputation for being difficult to breed, hatch, and raise among nearby friends with similar water to ours. Fundulopanchax amieti is a semi-annual killifish from Eastern Cameroon.

Aside: Semi-annual means, among other things, that the eggs can rest in drying mud and plant debris for a short time, say weeks, and then hatch when the rains return. It is common to find this ability, where there are two rainy seasons about evenly spaced in the year, as in Cameroon. By contrast annual killies, for example Nothobranchius,  can tolerate much longer dry periods say six months.  Non-annual species can still arrive at remote puddles by swimming upsteam, then jumping across wet forest floor during a rain, or in the mud clinging to the feet of wading birds.


Fundulopanchax amieti is an IUCN Endangered species.

This link is to the  IUCN Red list page for Fp. amieti:   https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/182209/7831690

As you see from the link, Fp. amieti is  "...  found in ... tributaries of the larger Sanaga and Dibamba River drainage basins.. All known populations, except one, are from the area to the north of the Sanaga River in southwestern Cameroon."

Here is a photo of our larger  male:from Gerald Lofstead.

In the wild they live in water temperature 24.8C ~ 76.6 F, pH 6.5, DH 0.2 according to
The West African Killies page for Fp.amieti

and here is a look at the area north of the Sanaga River in southwestern Cameroon"

2.SPP The second species is Aphyosemion splendopleure Tiko Green from Bill Hodgekiss. Tiko is the type locality and Scheel (for example, 1990) considered SPP a synonym of of A. bitaeniatum This is a  species we have been successful with in the past.

Other than the fact that the fry are small, and so may require a smaller first food (Banana Worms, Paramecium, Rotifers, San Francisco  Bay brine shrimp not the larger Utah strain from Brine Shrimp Direct), they are fairly easy. We use mops and hatch the fry in their parent's water as usual.

.Here is the Google Earth view of Tiko, Cameroon and vicinity.

The AKA writeup is here:

http://www.wak.aka.org/Ref_Library/Aphyosemion/A.splendopleure.htm

As you see, Scheel  in Rivulins of the Old World (1968, page 126) writes the Tiko ... "population lives in the rather hard, alkaline water of the volcanic area."

This would explain why we do well with this supposedly difficult species. Our own water has those characteristics, draining the Watchung flood basalts (solidified lava) and then passing through  laterite soils formed in a once tropical forest. Both the lava and the red laterite soils formed 200 million years ago. Our water is just what SPP evolved in.

Tiko sub-division is indeed adjacent to Mt. Cameroon, see:

https://www.science.gov/topicpages/m/mt+cameroon+volcano.html

where item 2 says that "... Buea, Limbe, West Coast, Tiko and Muyuka [are] sub-divisions adjacent to Mt. Cameroon."

Below is the google Earth image showing the proximity of Tiko to Mt Cameroon/

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Conclusion: These two species will do best breeding in different water chemistry. AMI has evolved in soft, mildly acid water, SPP has evolved in "hard, rather alkaline water".

Killifish Breeding : What is the point? Human survival.

Most of the West African killifish are important predators of mosquitoes.  Both killifish and mosquitoes breed in temporary waters, for example roadside ditches and streams that form in the rainy seasons.

As mosquito predators, many Killifish are much more important than other fish, because they can survive drying out of isolated pools.  These species with eggs resting in dried mud are called annual or semi-annual killifish, and they live through much of central Africa, and also South and Central America, in places where mosquitoes are a serious risk to the population.

Again, some killifish are present in remote temporary pools because their eggs survive in the mud when the water dries up. When the rains return, the eggs hatch, and the fish grow rapidly. Killifish are locally called rainfish for this reason.

In some browsers you must CLICK TWICE

 Changes in West Africa climates are already happening, and dramatic ecosystem changes will cause extinctions in the wild to the fish that eat mosquitoes. Read the link below.

Climate Change Assessment for West Africa

Under the conditions the wild fish evolved in, they can reproduce well and consume most of the mosquito larvae. However, these wild fish cannot tolerate very high temperatures or large changes in Sodium, Magnesium, and Calcium ions in the water.  If these fish do not survive, parts of West Africa, for example,  may be uninhabitable in the near future. That's where captive breeding helps.

Groups of scientists and volunteers around the world are cooperating in captive breeding programs to ensure the survival of  these small fish. Breeding pairs or eggs are exchanged between small labs and amateur hatcheries, along with small water samples from the aquariums in which they were bred and raised.  Since the local water varies, strains are developed which can tolerate new conditions in West Africa as they arise. We are creating a living archive to face climate change as it happens.