Killifish Breeding : There were always fish around.

Funny thing about a lifelong hobby,  for example Tropical Fish. Hobbies intertwine with everything else in your life. A couple of days ago I went online to rejoin AKA, the American Killifish Association. It's a tropical fish club, sure, but AKA is very technical, very scientific. Aquarists all over the world raise the fish you buy in pet shops, but AKA aquarists travel the world, collect fish, send them to ichthyologists, and raise them. Many are rare and sometimes threatened species.


Anyway, its been a while. So far, neither I nor  AKA can find my old password. I was a member too long ago. AKA officers are still trying. Trying to rejoin  stirred a lot of memories.




A little background. In my teens I mowed lawns, did mason work and gardening. I had a dog,  hamsters, a Caiman, and tropical fish. Tetras, to be specific. I fished in Millington, NJ, in the gorge where the Great Swamp flows out to form the Passaic River. On January 1st, 1966, I met Susan on a blind date. I was 19.
This is my wife Susan.

Susan setting up a camera tripod, Kenya National Museum, in Nairobi , 1972.

When Susan and I began dating, she had dogs too, and she had raised tropical fish as a kid. We met just before I left for my Advanced Infantry Training School at Camp Pendleton, and then on to my first tour in Vietnam.

Dong Ha, Second Tour, RVN.  I took this picture by looking downhill behind my guard post. The streams in this area were loaded with tropical fish, notably green Bettas

Sue and I  married in 1969. We had a small apartment in Highland Park, NJ. From about 1969 to 1972, while at Rutgers and  Princeton, Sue and I "got back into fish". In those days there was a great pet store, Jersey Pet Supply, in New Brunswick, NJ. There were weekly arrivals of fish from all over the world, Killies, Tetras, Gouramis, Danios, catfish, you name it, they had it. Not just the common species. Anything could show up. We bought many fish. And books! Know how to breed Egg-Layers, Enjoy the Tetras, Enjoy your Killifish, all kinds of How-to books. Using one book we bred our pair of Bettas, more colorful than the green one I saw in a Vietnam stream. We had overwhelming success. Then the reality hit: "what will we do with all these babies?" We fed them, they grew. We collected and washed a lot of jars. We gave the Bettas away. We bought a pair of Lyretail killifish.

Golden Lyretails Aphyosemion australe

I bought several Killifish books. A colleague at Rutgers who also frequented the store suggested the local killie club, Metropolitan AKA. I drove us to Rosario La Corte's house in Elizabeth, NJ, where I met the famous aquarist and author. He showed us around the garage he had fitted out as a fish hatchery. I asked a lot of questions. Then I drove the three of us to the MAKA meeting. Susan and I put aside our Betta breeding and set up a killie room in our closet.


We were also into saltwater fish. When we went to Bonaire for our belated honeymoon, and we saw a lot of coral reef fish while snorkeling. I repaired a broken Nikonos camera belonging to our host, Captain Don Stewart. A friend had warned me about the hotel's "prone to flooding" Nikonos. We came forearmed with a copy of "how to disassemble a flooded Nikonos" and a set of replacement O-rings. Captain Don  called me "resourceful", a great compliment. As a reward, he and his son took us snorkeling off the north end of the island. We remember brain corals the size of our living room, and acres of staghorn corals 15 feet high. The next year we got certified as NAUI scuba divers. We bought a used Nikonos (still have it). We went to Grand Cayman. Our first ocean dive was 130 feet down off the drop-off. We collected salt water fish and brought them home. Below are underwater pictures of the trip. In the net in my hands is a Royal Gramma.

   

A Royal Gramma

Back in the States, before MAKA club meetings, Rosario La Corte patiently explained to us how he bred fish in his huge garage fishroom. Square tanks with low walls contained Tetras under skylights. . Also tall tanks with very large Discus and Angelfish. He made brine shrimp with eggs from a container larger than a coffee can.  A small room adjacent contained Nothobranchius killies. An above ground swimming pool outside collected rainwater. I joined AKA in February of 1969.


In the 60's and 70's,  AKA's "Killie Notes"  had a "Fish and Egg Listing" where members could advertise live killifish and eggs for sale (they still do). Since most Killifish eggs can lie dormant for a while, the eggs travel well. I bought A. christyi eggs through the mail from Jose M. de Arredondo in Spain. I still remember when the eggs arrived. Inside an envelope was a small plastic pill box with thin flexible foam packing. It was slightly moist, and contained a dozen eggs with live embryos inside, ready to hatch. "Just add water...". It rained, we waited for 30 minutes, then collected the rainwater and poured it on the eggs. They hatched , we fed them, they grew, they colored up. Amazing colors in a freshwater fish. We gave them away with great pride.

I helped with the AKA convention in Saddle River, I think, about 1972. Jose M. de Arredondo flew in from Spain and slept on our couch the night before the convention opened. Rosario gave the talk at dinner.


As I was saying, beginning in 1972, Sue and I worked in East Africa.

During time off, we collected Nothobranchius Killifish  for the Kenya National Museum on behalf of Humphry Greenwood of the British Museum of Natural History.

Nothobranchius near N. guentheri

We bought a house in 1980. Soon afterward our sons were born. We did a lot of fishing and crabbing. The boys had goldfish. I took up surf fishing. Both boys are now expert fishermen. Phil in the surf, Chris offshore on party boats

Chris and Phil crabbing at my Dad's boat dock

We took vacations to the Caribbean, and they learned to snorkel. They took underwater photos of coral reef fish. Back home we built a goldfish pond, and raised koi, goldfish, guppies and platys outside. The latter two came in in the winter. As a teenager, my son Chris worked at Petco in the fish department. We took down the saltwater tanks and built a zebrafish hatchery in the basement. Chris fed infusoria to the fry, then brine shrimp. They grew big, and Chris sold the adults to a local pet chain.  Chris had bred zebrafish commercially.

We got a house in Florida. We watch schools of Snook patrol the shallows as we swam.

 Susan behind the Florida House

Both sons have growing families.

Fast forward to 2015. The zebrafish hatchery has become a killifish hatchery. The AKA still has "fish and eggs" for sale listings , and thanks to Aquabid you can buy tropical fish internationally. As a consequence, hundreds of aquarists are conserving species that are in danger of extinction.


So I bought some killies. Last year I intended to raise a lot of A. celiae (Red List update Endangered) , but instead cranked out a hundred young A. primigenium (Red List Vulnerable!). We gave them away to other breeders.

This year I'll try A. celiae again.