AbbeysDad
Fish Gatherer
> In the hobby 50+ years.
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Happy day,
As a kid I used to be an assistant manager of an LFS with four locations. This meant I could keep the oddballs that no one ordered but arrived in the boxes, anyway. And so it came to be that I acquired a pair of belonesox belizanus, a livebearer type of pike from central America. While I had access to the internet, the world wide web did not yet exist, and so information on how to breed them was not as accessible as it is today. I'm going to let that sink in a moment...yes, the internet existed for almost 25 years before the web. Ok millennials, take a deep breath. Unfurrow your brows and wipe that puzzled look of your face or it will stay that way, just like your mother always told you when you'd make a funny face. I mean it.
Now, where was I. Oh yes, so I put the pair into a 20g long and enjoyed feeding them deformed guppies, tetras and barbs that we couldn't sell. What did I tell you about making funny faces? There wasn't anything malicious about this act, I was just Mother Nature's handmaiden and served the B's the food they required. Anyway, the general manager had this idea that if I raised the temperature to the mid-80s and let the water get all acidic and nasty and low in the tank, that it would be like a hot, dry summer. And then...I needed to make a rainy season. So here is what I did.
I waited until night and the lights were out. I held a pair of those semi-rigid aluminum foil roasting pans that you can buy for a couple of bucks at the grocery store and, by twisting my wrists at various speeds, made a warbling sound with them, like thunder. A roommate flipped the lights in the room on and off, like lightning. And then another roommate used a flower pitcher with all the little holes in the spout and put in cooler tap water. And we made it rain. We did this for a week. I confess that we adopted the Grateful Dead song, Looks Like Rain, as our theme song for this effort. There might have been the burning of incense. I think it was incense. Because everyone knows that lightning strikes in forests cause fires and things get smoky, in a way and after a fashion. And so with a series of aggressive water changes and warbling of pans and enough flashing of lights to cause the epileptic across the street to seize up (ok, that's not true, but it might have been if there was one outside walking a cat or something), the fish got frisky and a month or so later, a few young were born.
Years later I came to learn that none of this was necessary, and that if I just dumped some salt in the tank it would have all worked out fine. I've learned a little bit more about breeding since then, most notably that I also didn't need to do any of that with my wife. But I'm sure it helped.
Nah, that totally counts. If they're breeding, it's because you gave them the right conditions, so it's still on you.My highest achievement would be a tossup- either my having kept a few simple species of plants alive, or having bred a couple species of fish.
Although the second one was really unintentional, and should probably be disqualified.
Yee Ha and that is what this hobby is all about thanks for sharing love itI live to serve...
Here's the first video I shot of the tank, when it was about 3 months old.
Here's the most recent, from a couple months ago: