Pygmy Perch

David Bloch (ebloch at alpha1.curtin.edu.au)
Fri, 12 Jul 1996 20:42:13 +0800

To all Rainbow listers:
ANGFA (WA) will be planning to do collecting trips and general information
gathering trips to the South west of WA once our permit is issued. We would
love to go ASAP but if we are caught collecting without a permit by a ranger
it may reduce our chance of getting the permit in the future! Some of our
members are especially interested in obtaining specimens of the Salamander
fish to establish captive breeding popluations as well as other endemic
South West species such as Balstons Pygmy Perch and Galaxids.

Speaking of Pygmy Perches - the Western Pygmy Perch really is an excellent
aquarium fish. I have found that if you collect it during the breeding
season while it is diplaying breeding colouration, it will hold that
colouration given you feed it a good and varied diet with plenty of live
food. I also heard an interesting story about pygmy's the other day. A
lecturer at uni was telling me that the pygmy perch have a strange habit of
swimming upto marron (freshwater crayfish) and eating the little parasites
from them. Infact many farmers have pygmy perch in their dams to control
the parasites - namely temocephila, which reduces the price of the marron
because they cluster around the underside of the tail. Even in an
aquariunm, pygmy's will gather around marron to gobble up the parasites!



David Bloch
B.Sc. (BIOLOGY)
Curtin University of Technology, Perth Western Australia
ANGFA (WA) home page: http://student.curtin.edu.au/~ebloch/ANGFA.HTML
Email - ebloch at alpha1.curtin.edu.au
Snail Mail - 15 Ramsay Close Noranda 6062
Perth Western Australia