Gary - I've said this stuff before, but it bears repeating IMHO: no-one has
successfully proven that environment causes all difficulties in
rainbowkeeping in all cases, and my guess is that they never will...
I know I've said the following before too.... Here in Canberra we have an
"old" strain of Melanotaenia herbertaxelrodi that gets ulcers and dies
within 18 months. All this strain came from 2 pairs of fish bought in
Adelaide in 1985 or 1986.
Are you suggesting that every single fishkeeper that has kept this strain of
herberts in the past or is keeping them now has poor environmental
conditions? Some of these people have been rank amateurs... but some are
highly accomplished fishkeepers who have bred thousands of "difficult" fish,
over periods of decades.
(gl) definition of difficult fish = trying to raise Lake Tanganyikan cichlids
in Long Island NY water. pH= 5.5 GH= less than 40 ppm, the way they talk KH is
non existant. Yet they can breed the heck out of some of the rainwater
killifish that we have to work so hard with. YET, they raise lake Tanganyikan
ciclids {don't ask me why :-) } by adapting their water to match their natural
conditions. You can't raise em in soft acid water. You can get by for a while
with softer water (for your NG bows) but eventually it's going to catch up with
you. If you raise NG bows (eg your herbie, use eggs) under hard water (200 ppm
+) high pH and your ulcer problem comes back then I'll agree it's genetic. You
haven't eliminated the environmental hurdles first.
Explain to me why the "new" herberts we have in Canberra don't suffer from
ulcers, or if they do it is the same low level suffered by any other rainbow?
*(gl) If people managed to raise small quantities of herbies that had the ulcer
disease already maybe they just came down with it quicker. Maybe the people
that have the new strain are taking better care of it, ie more frequent water
changes so that the pH doesn't change as wildly. The lakes environs are low
temp (21-24C)/ (70-76F) and pH 7.6 to 8.0. Drop the pH to 6.6 and herbies
start getting this white slime all over them. { :-) don't ask me how I know
that but I've had mine going since ~ 1983 and almost killed them during the
first 2 months). Keep it somewhere in between and you're going to stress your
herbert and then you'll see the ulcer disease.
*(gl) again we have a lot of the same fish, decended from the same group and
they are doing ok if we watch their environmental conditions. I'm sorry if I
implied that you are stupid, it wasn't meant. But you are stubborn :-) Take
the pH up and watch your problems go away.
There are now M. arfakensis and the new Chilatherina from Mamxxx in Oz, new
blood. If you raise these under the same conditions you will find them rapidly
succumbing too unless you are changing tremendous amounts of water per week.
Explain to me, maybe I'm stupid ;), why certain species of 'bows are dying
out in captivity in Australia? They tend, from my limited observation, to be
NG species, that are descended from limited importations. Do all
rainbowkeepers all over Australia have poor tank environments, all the time?
*(gl) - David was trying to raise fry under extremely poor temperature
conditions yet all of a sudden we started talking about these terrible genetic
conditions. You didn't even notice that the temperature was 3-5 degrees C (10
degrees F) under temperatures used to successfully raise fry. It sure sounded
like a reason to bring up the genetic card again.
"My fry hatching tanks are now running in the low 20's, between 21 and
23."
I'm *not* "sudden(ly) leap(ing) from incorrect fry raising procedures to
blaming lousy
genetics" - I believe that this is at least part of the problem all along.
*(gl) - and we didn't get any of those eggs from Ron???? How come our fish are
doing quite nicely when they are kept in conditions more conducive to their
liking? Put them in LOW hardness conditions, and perhaps more importantly low
KH and fluctuating low pH's and you can have problems. One of the newer
rainbowfishes, M. arfakensis is such a rainbow because it does much better in
hard, higher pH water. It hasn't had time to "genetically dissolve". What I
am saying is that we need to look a lot harder at how we take care of our
fishes instead of just declaring them genetically bad. Get Allen's new book,
read it and decide if your fish are at all close to those pH's listed.
Dear old Herbert himself (*gl - god will be the judge :-))bred a strain of
livebearers
(swordtails, was it? Or Platies?) that were more prone to tumours,
(gl) I believe they were extremely black and black has been known to produce
melanistic tumors.
for
research purposes, couldn't we have a strain of 'bows more prone to ulcers,
or infant mortality, as in the above case?
* a big grin :-) if I raised them under boiling conditions there would be a lot
of infant mortality too. Same with freezing temp. When you try and raise
bleheri at 21 degrees C (~70 F) you might as well try and raise them at the
extremes. You'll never raise a bunch of them, maybe 10% if you're lucky.
(heaping everything on this poor herbie that gets ulcers under low pH
conditions. I guess "scam" implies a deeper/darker meaning in Oz.
If you still have some NG bows, increase the pH and hardness and start seeing
them really take off, you'll be amazed at how much better they'll be.