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People who like them should learn to breed them. Their habitat is going down the tube, and they'll probably go with it. They're fine at the moment, but when the dams go in for hydro-electric, a lot of Loracarids are going to become old photos.

If you notice them half an inch apart next year, and 3/4 the year after, it's just continental drift and plate tectonics.

Your water and your tastes don't match up well. You like softwater fish, though paradise fish (opercularis) will thrive in water that's wet. The tank is a bit small for them, kribs, and most Apistos. A. borellii would work, if you can find it. Rams aren't Apistos, but the tank size is tight...

At 81f, that tank should get pasta thrown into it. Well, okay, I get a little carried away. I doubt one degree will matter. It might for breeding, but for keeping, probably not. I'm a celsius guy, not a Foreignhot one, but I avoid the warm water fish. Energy costs plus condensation in winter...

You could also play Lungfish, the Longfin Killies, Fish, Phish and a few others. They aren't great bands, but fish can relate to them somehow.

You like to look for fish that don't have a long history in the hobby. It's often not so much changing stuff as learning stuff. I'll take a wild guess and say the experience of actually keeping these once rarer than rare species has taught aquarists something. We usually start out playing with...

Beware though. There is evidence that a hard tap on the glass, given the lateral line is an exposed nerve, may cause the fish pain. The old myth about fish not feeling pain is a comfy story for us, but study of their nervous systems shows that everything needed to feel pain is there and operating.

I see no sign of Ich parasites, although a couple of the blurry photos look like there is some kind of white spotting. It could be the glass - the photos are fuzzy. I'm thinking water quality, which can give an opening to a problem called Epistylis. A 12 ltr tank is a big problem - it is too...

Fish have lateral line, an organ that senses vibration. It's partly why dynamite fishing kills them. But I love my loud music, and used to have a system that worked above the hum of the filters and bubbling. I found if I was playing roots dub reggae with its thundering, snaking basslines, they...

Both rainbow and red tailed "sharks" tend to hit other fish when they are asleep. They're territorial and nocturnal. New aquarists buy them because of the dorsal looking sharklike, but they become problem fish in most tanks. Some individual fish are okay, but not many. You tend to find dead or...

It's a very different fish from pulcher, or kribensis. First off, the size of the fish matters. Over time, it isn't a dwarf Cichlid in my estimation. One of my males lived a long time after he killed the female. I read this, and I wonder of I'm a fool because I would keep them again. But when...

P sacrimontis get bigger than a pulcher. I would get a Congo tetra sized dither - something that hits 6-7bcm plus and can move.

Not cherry barbs! That fish is bottom oriented, and won't work as a dither. I'd look for a fast moving upper third of the tank fish. It would have to be tough, and able to scoot through the current.

I kept sacrimontis twice, years ago, and tried everything to manage the aggression. I failed. It's possible I learned though. This fish is beautiful, and I really liked them. I found the behaviour a lot like Wallaceochromis from farther north, and I never got anywhere with them, either. P...

So today, whale watching with a visiting friend. It wasn't the best - a lovely bracing day, but only one finback, a handful of porpoises and a lot of seals. But the sea was good, and the experience is always worth going out. Once you get out on the bay, a September day does a pretty good...

Soo, give yourself time. Walk those aisles and look at the fish. Is there Ich? If yes, is the tank shut? Are there dead fish, or emaciated fish with bent spines? Do the tanks look clean and the fish look healthy? There's not much more you can ask yourself in a store like that, other than if...

I save 1 letter on one species, and 3 or 4 on another. I'm sure most of that paper talks of methods and formulas I lack the training to understand, and frankly, that I lack the interest to learn. But the results expressed in plainer English are always interesting in scientific papers. I may...

It is scary that more and more fish are only available online, as what you don't get to see is a concern. Buying sight unseen is having absolute trust in the seller. There are sellers I know and trust, and I know there's nothing I'd spot they wouldn't. They wouldn't sell me sick fish through...

A key consideration for buying the Japanese made jehmco pump was how quiet it is. My little Chinese ones sound like 1930s fighter planes. But to run airstones, it is a lot. I use my pumps to filter the fishroom, and the piston pumps are crucial to my set up. They're the heart. If it's just for...

I have 2 of those pumps, stored. They don't last long, and the problem is usually the gasket. When I was younger and chronically broke, I tried to fix one, but I could never get the seal right. Sadly, they're disposable. They're inexpensive now, but they weren't not many years ago. The Jehmco...

Of course fighter planes are prolific. Where else would drones come from?

How we run a fishroom, or a tank, is fundamentally subjective. Hopefully we try to learn from observations. Here are some of mine I work from. Wild fish: I get mine with few steps. They arrive in the wholesaler's, from whom I get them. Have they had diseases? Occasionally, but ones I saw...

I'll be going to a Provincial Park, taking a visitor to see a waterfall, a salmon river and some rocky beaches with a couple of short hikes. I'm hoping there are no cruise ship tours there, but there's room if they are there, and they only have time to explore the easiest to get to spots. It's...

I had a mentor/friend who simplified his set up to one or two species of killies in his eighties, but who only shut those tanks when he went into assisted living at 95. He had started at 11, and at 18 had been the manager of the fish department in an upscale department store. He never got bored...

DNA teaches us that our eyeballs are not adapted to understanding what we see. They're great for telling us to eat this and not that, but the fine points are often things we can't see. We're learning so much, and those of us who aren't pros are chasing the learning. I hate paywalls. I want to...

Next week I'll be 66. I got my first tank at 8, and have had fish continuously since. And I swear, I'm just as excited about it as day one.

At that point, you have to think through what fish go with what habitat. If I have a very "filled" tank with lots of plants, I'll pick fish that live in the tangles of roots along stream banks. I usually start with the fish and build the tank around it, but an aquascaper would reverse that. I...

We are the water changes of aquarium discussion. We keep it clean.

And the Coryking says "off with his headline!" I suggest all interested look at the section in question over the next few days, and then if we want, we can start adding.

I guess what worries me is the policing side. I like the idea that we all put things into a set format and talk about fish we know and love. But what if someone decides to post the kind of article I dealt with last year - sincere, well meaning and chock full of confidently repeated untrue stuff...

I'm very skeptical. Every forum I've ever been on has wanted to have an attached fish book. Not one has ever succeeded. I'd rather throw my support behind something like Seriously Fish. When the internet was new, I thought we'd have naturally forming groups of people whose time and effort had...

I know you are being literal there. I quarantine for weeks, and try not to mix farm bred with wild caught, or to mix wilds from different regions. I've seen the limits of quarantine, and we are only dealing with the obvious and avoidable as we do it. We wait out the simplest bacterial and viral...

I like slime molds, but they don't stay around long. They pop up every now and then, then move on. They aren't the prettiest things that visit our tanks, but they do no harm.

It's an interesting reaction I didn't expect. I come from hockey world, and know that game really well. Where I live, there are a few NFL fanatics, and NFL gambling fanatics. In the High School, maybe 10% of the kids cared about American football, so I picked my rebuilding team of the year and...

I bred about 30 different species, described and undescribed. In brief, I learned that their territories tend to be larger than our tanks, so they can't be crowded. Stress kills them. Females are more assertive and tend to dominate situations way more than the books admitted. Every species has...

I think a project like that would need an editor, or editors. There are so many fish profiles online that are simply wrong. Seriously Fish clearly has some sort of editorial board reviewing things, and that's why we can disagree on points, but they are always grounded in fact. From having...

People, especially kids, get passionate about knowing their sport. I have found that when I'm asked my team, if I say I dislike NFL football, they can act insulted. But if you say you like an awful team, they get to feel superior and sorry for you, and they leave you alone. For years, I could...

I've done the hockey pucky, but that may be regional.

I don't like the NFL game, but I love to annoy people by claiming to love the worst team in the league, and acting like I think they'll win the super bowl. Who should I choose this year?

A couple of weeks back, I picked up ten Poropanchax normani, Norman's lampeye. I put them in a fully cycled, planted quarantine tank (which here means an unused tank...) for the requisite month to six weeks. Since I had more males than females, I threw in some breeding mops for cover. I think...