Meeting Notes

January, 2011

Conservation in the Aquarium Hobby, by Joshua Weigert

Maintaining At-risk fish: Many fish were once readily available, but now are not. Royal pleco from Brazil are not available now.

Cross-breeding and mutations are problems with putting fish together and being inbred. Nutrition can also be a problem.

Hybridization: A big risk with Lake Victoria cichlids. All the females haplichromis look about and it's easy for species to cross over. Barriers that protect them in the wild are unknown in the home aquarium. Same is true of angelfish - there are three species, but they have interbred to produce one species. You see this in livebearers and goodeids.

Some fish can go out of fashion.

Hobbyists are responsible for unlocking secrets about fish. Hobbyists got marine fish to breed and have a database called the The Breeder's Registry, where they share their experiences in breeding fish and rearing fry.

Zebra pleco, fish-keepers paid $300 for them and fed them algae wafers and zucchini, and they would waste away. The plecos wanted bloodworms and a hobbyist stumbled onto the fact that zebra plecos are carnivorous and that they are aggressive with each other and will kill each other in the night.

Another avenue where hobbyists have had inroads is in reducing resources. Take Marine light systems for example. It used to be you would use 2000 watts of light to light the tank, but now we use LED lights with less energy used, less cost to maintain. They are better for the environment. The aquarium hobby is where a lot of the new lights showed up. Wattage use has gone down with advances in the hobby.

Pumps have also improved. Smaller pumps can do a better job with new technology.

One of the biggest problems that aquarists are responsible for is for releasing fish into the wild. They compete with the local fauna, and cause all sorts of problems. They eat everything in site, eat other fish, spread disease.

Northern Snakehead: The media panic led to government ruling that all snakeheads were illegal in the trade. In Canada they tried to pass a law to ban goldfish and koi. There is a simple solution for that: Never release an aquarium fish or keep it where it can get out to the wild.

An ounce of prevention: dwarf African frogs, apple snails, cherry shrimp, Malysian Trumpet Snails are all a problem. MTS spreads a bad species of nematoad. Dispose of them by boiling them or freezing them. They can survive chlorine.

Plants: hygrophala polysperma is invasive in Texas, Florida, Arizona and Mass. Green Bomba: can be found almost anywhere. Eurasian milfoil has escaped and outcompetes our native milfoil. Hydrilla is invasive and was brought over as an aquarium plant. Elodia is sold commonly in the aquarium trade, and people flush the clippings or compost the clippings or throw them in waterways. Completely dry them out and throw away.

Pond plants: water lettuce, water hyacinth, purple loosetrife: roots hang down so far and block the way of fish swimming streams. Completely chokes out wetlands and takes away all the food, and all the plants dry out the wetland.

A pound of cure: Don't release a pest. Don't buy small fish that will become a monster. Help protect the environment. Habitattitude sends out bags with warnings on them not to release fish into the wild. Most humane thing to do is to freeze the fish if you have a fish that you cannot re-home or keep. Don't release them into the wild!

Aquarists can help by spreading out flyers. Get involved with projects to remove invasive species Trash can be removed from the Potomac watershed. Debris clogs up water ways.

The best way aquarists can help is to get together and talk to each other. Joshua gets emails re: endangered fish asking where a person can get rare and endangered fish. PVAS gets rare fish in the auction. Breeders and hobbyists maintain rare and endangered fish. It's a great idea to find someone else who is keeping that fish and add new fish to the mix.

Submitted by Sherry Mitchell