Greater Chicago Cichlid Association

THE BALD TAX BLOG

May 2012

Hey, remember my blog entry from last month?  Forget what I said about April and my coma.  Its starting to look more like the coma will start in June this year!!  Maybe it’s the weather turning colder again, but I have been pretty engaged with the fish room and my fish of late.

First, I did the unthinkable.  I eliminated six tanks from the fish room.  The editorial commentary from my spouse (a much better half of myself) became much more frequent and on point about the space no longer available for her commute to and from the washer and dryer.  Not to mention my tendency to leave hoses lying around, the obstacle course had become essentially unworkable for my domestic engineer.

After she endured yet another cut knuckle on my 125g tank stand as she passed by with a basket of laundry, I uttered the familiar phrase we all at one time have said aloud:

I’m sorry, you’re right….

Thus I got motivated to do a Spring reorg of the fish room!

Secondly, I picked up some reportedly wild Astronotus ocellatus, the Oscar.  These were sold to me as being exported out from Brazil, which I believe just relaxed some exportation limitations of certain species, including ocellatus.

I have been a complete moron with ocellatus historically.  I absolutely love the look of the nuts-and-bolts wild type Oscar, the dark coloring, with olive highlights.  I found ways to acquire different wild-type variants over the last 3 years or so, but found reasons to pass them along to others.  I think it is easy for all of us to fall into looking forward to the next species to acquire while losing sight of the fish we currently have.  Sometimes it is based on looking for the next breeding project or making space accommodations for current breeding projects.

I acquired a group of four of these Brazil Oscars and have been surprised at the aggression of these as compared to others I have kept.  These are barely 2 inches in length, but they are tough on each other and the dithers I have introduced.  I’ll add some more dithers to deflect aggression when my next generation of Amatitliana siquia "Rio Cabayo Nicoya Peninsula", the gold convict-type that I have been fortunate to keep. 

http://www.gcca.net/2011-06-25-05-28-36/120-amatitliana-siquia

Speaking of the Rio Cabayo siquia, the wild pair started to have some “disagreements” and the female was taking a bit of punishment.  I separated the pair and had an idea.  I took a rather attractive and colorful F1 Rio Cabayo siquia female from another tank and added her to the tank of the wild male.  They just spawned and I’m now really interested in growing these out to see of the gold coloring is further emphasized with this group. 

If you haven’t seen or heard of these Rio Cabayo siquia, you need to see me.  I’m passing fry and pairs along to whoever asks for some.  This fish is really something all hobbyists can appreciate.  This is a very colorful species, very good parents, small enough to keep in a 20g long, just a fun fish to watch and enjoy.  I have some to spare and I hope to bring them to the GCCA Classic. 

Speaking of, if you have not yet make plans to attend the Classic, definitely consider it.  I have found over the years that I grow to enjoy these type of events for varying reasons.  First, the speakers always leave you with knowledge that helps you advance further into the hobby.  We are fortunate in our club meetings to have a speaker each month and just simply listening to the topic brings further enrichment for me with these wonderful animals. 

Secondly, the Classic is a great way to meet new people.  Again, you learn things by shooting the chat and establish connections to people who may spawn that fish you always wanted to keep.

Third,…did you see this year’s Classic logo? Cichlids on the brain!!  I can’t wait for my polo shirt.

Also, don’t forget the fish show, banquet and, of course, the Sunday auction.  It will be….classic.

Perhaps against my better judgement, I agreed to do a new talk at GCCA's upcoming Cichlid Classic called "Sixty Tips in 60 Minutes".

I saw a similar talk on technology and liked the format, so I thought . . .why not try it for fish?

The idea is to rapidly present a variety of tips for saving money, saving time, or working better in the fishroom. 

If you have a tip, I would love to hear about it . . . especially if you have a picture you can send, too.

Click This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ! Thanks!  Rick Borstein

Last month, I had the opportunity to visit with Ted Judy at his fishroom near Madison, WI. Ted is an expert in West African cichlids and he has visited Africa to collect these interesting fish twice. Need I mention that he is a frequent speaker to aquarium clubs and a very knowledgeable hobbyist, too?

I met Ted at his beautiful home and got to see his amazing and spotless aquariums. Ted had an awesome planted tank in his living room. These always impress me as I'm pretty awful keeping plants alive. This tank was a carpet of green! Almost all of his aquariums have plants in them.

Ted is active in aquarium clubs in Milwaukee and he started one in Madison which is doing great. We got to chat about running clubs and he is very knowledgeable.

Ted keeps a variety of fish including, of course, lots of West African cichlids, but he also had a very nice selection of livebearers, too. It is always great to visit someone's fishroom because I always learn something new! For example, I found out that water hardness affects the sex ratio of some livebearers. Interesting!

Ted sells fish at very reasonable prices. I came home with Chromidotilapia kingsleyae, Pelvicachomis taeniatus "moliwe", and Limia sp. "Tiger".

Ted recently has begun selling Repashy gel foods. I've tried a couple of them and they are terrific. Even my large, predatory cichlids will eat the veggie food. I've also tried the Community Gel and my fish love it.

Ted was nice enough to donate enough samples for everyone at the last GCCA Meeting to try the food.

You can see what Ted has for sale at www.tedsfishroom.com. You'll find a lot of other great information there, too, so it's worth the click!

I've included a few pics below.

 
Most Ted's tanks have very nice plants like these two above.

 
Ted netting out some Limia sp. "Tiger" for me.

 
GCCA Members holding up samples of Repashy gel food donated by Ted Judy.

Ever have a tank get cloudy?

I think everyone has experienced this at one time or another. Most recently, I had a really bad snail outbreak in a 90-gallon tank, so I removed the fish (which I was selling anyway) and bleached the tank. After 24-hours of snail-killing  bleach, I stirred the sand substrate and siphoned out as much debris as I could. Then, I refilled the tank.

This is where the "cloudy" happened. After filling the tank and re-starting the filter, the tank was cloudy with very fine sediment. Usually, the filter will remove this in 24 hours. but after a week the tank was still cloudy. What to do?

Accu-Clear to the Rescue

I was a bit stumped at this point, but then I remembered that I had won a goodie bag at one of the GCCA Meetings in the raffle. Inside, was an 8 ounce bottle of Accu-Clear from Aquarium Pharmaceuticals. This, I thought, is worth a try.

Using the product is simple. Just dump in 1 teaspoon (5ml) per ten gallons of water. The cap offers a convenient measure built in.

Bonus! Within 24-hours my tank water was sparkling clear!

How does it work?

Accu-Clear is a flocculant. The chemicals in the product bond to particles in the water a bit like glue and aggregate them. The result is that the particles fall out of the water column to the bottom of the tank where you can ignore them (I did) or siphon them out.

Although I didn't have fish in the tank at the time, you can use this product even if your tank is stocked.

Final Thoughts

What else can I say?

This product does what it claims to do. An 8 ounce bottle will run you $7 to $10 and will treat 480 gallons of water. I think this is a good product that every aquarist ought to have on hand. 

Over 55 GCCA Chatters available online to up date members.

Finally a use for my Ipad other than my daughter playing games on it. I find these are great to read on my ipad.

Some sample articles from our 2012 Chatter -

- Cheap and easy low tech water change system

- Walter Worms

- Breeding the Red Cap Lethinrops Itunga

Or read some great blasts from the past articles such as

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The Bald Tax Blog April 2012

April…here it is…. the last month of my “cichlid season”, no April foolin’ (!), when the weather starts to “nicen-up” (fyi - I have my own vocabulary) and my attention turns to the outdoors…my golf game…the backyard pool…the sun…a hoppy ale.  Yes….

Did you feel that?  I just felt my blood pressure lower a few points.

Before April ends, the fish in my tanks drop way down the pecking order of my attention. Sure…every few years or so I undertake a pond project, with intentions to extend my cichlid season, but I then succeed in becoming distracted, lazy, unmotivated…the pool…the sun….a cocktail.  Yes….You may know of what I speak?  We’ve been fortunate here in Chicago to enjoy Summer during our Winter, so my distraction is happening as I type.

Mind you, the fish are never the worse for wear…weekly water changes are never missed during “the Summer of my Coma.”  They all eat…they all grow….they all (most) multiply.  Occasional floaters are netted, garbaged.  Losers of territorial disputes are moved to safer, calmer waters.  The winners of territorial disputes are provided new challengers.  Boys are matched up with potential girlfriends, with resulting marriages or homicides (or both).  My fish are not entirely ignored…but they just simply see less of me.

April is about the time I make my plans for the ACA, vowing to register, bring show fish, and begin strategizing those convincing arguments for my wife that, “yes, Indianapolis is a happening summer vacation spot, let’s do it…?”

Then around October… “I’m back, Baby!” My cichlid season begins, and my fish startle me (not really), like I’m seeing them for the first time, they have grown more than I recall…and multiplied. I see things in the fish I’ve missed during my “offseason,” variant colors, maybe their deportment, their reaction to me.

The fish room suddenly becomes cleaner (almost), more organized.  Food and maintenance supplies seemingly are auto-restocked, sponge filters become clean (finally!) (almost!), some changed for new.  Hang-on back filters are discovered, get cleaned out.  Fry discovered within, and saved from, canister filters…and over-excited, jumping juveniles discovered and peeled from the floor. 

October…I begin combing over (insert bald tax guy joke here) my various favorite on-line vendor sale lists for new species…weekly…sometimes daily (hourly).  I start texting, calling guys named Pete, Gage, Snookn21, Dan Ye (actually Dan’s a girl) inquiring about $180 fish, collection points, shipping charges, flight schedules.

October….I get overly excited (not really) and undertake more dedicated efforts in obtaining, breeding uncommon, difficult, dull, brown-colored cichlid species, the fry of which I try to give away but it appears only I want them.  Old World keepers just smile at me, probably wondering to themselves…”What is wrong with this guy…?”

October….I vow to purchase a swap table (but never have) and bag up all sorts of my uncommon, difficult, dull, brown-colored cichlid species, just to see if I could give them away to unsuspecting strangers.  But I don’t, imagining those strangers just smiling at me, probably wondering to themselves…”What is wrong with this guy…?”

October…I research species during lunch, after work, trying to pronounce collection points and rivers…slowly pronouncing names like “At-a-ba-po”, as if I just awoke from a coma (e.g. 4-5 months of the pool…the sun….cocktails…!)

October…I once again begin believing that I can breed a pike species, only to end up with one pike by December. 

October…I dig out my DVD’s on Lake Nicaragua and Mexico cichlid species and wonder once again out loud how I can get Tomicichla tuba delivered to my door.  I comb through (insert joke here) Aqualog volumes, wondering whether I could just go book a flight to a random Central American country and take a canoe down something called Rio Malaria, or similar, and scoop up wild specimens for my tanks.

October…I once again measure the door dimensions to my fish room and work through the possible steps in getting a 750g acrylic tank down the stairs.

October…I once again regret giving away that mated pair of Amphilophus aggressosorum back during the summer coma, and then I find myself looking for a group of  eight juvenile  Amphilophus pissedoffus.

October…I once again realize that the ACA convention has come and gone and that Indianapolis is not as happening a summer vacation spot as I had thought it could be, and thus, I have missed yet another ACA convention.  I also once again curse the attendees for the lack of pictures posted of my favorite species (not really…maybe). 

So it’s April, and my cichlid season is winding down.  October will be here before I know it.  In the meantime, you can probably rob me blind of fish during the next 6 months.

I’ll blog each month of the offseason, and if they’re bad, well… we can all blame my summer coma.  So send me a topic that you would like me to write about…or else you’ll be reading things way worse then this.

Want to sell at our swap meet?

We still have tables available, but please hurry!

You will need to have a site log-in to register for the swap. You may register for up to 4 tables.

Tables are $40 each or $35 for paid, GCCA Members.

To register, log into our website then go to Docs & Events> Upcoming Events and select  April 22nd Swap Vendor Registration.

If you work with substrate-spawning cichlids, one thing you'll immediately notice is that fry can be extremely small. It's all too easy to siphon them out accidentally when doing a water change.

I keep newly free-swimming fry from egg layers in tiny 2-gallon Rubbermaid restaurant containers and I use a mini-siphon I made myself to carefully clean the bottom of excess food and debris. Here's how to make one yourself.

You'll need:

• One 12-14" piece of rigid aquarium airline tubing
• One small piece of insulated #14 electrical wire 
• A heat source (I use my gas stove)

Here's what to do . . .

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THE BALD TAX BLOG

March 2012

I’m lazy, so here is a 2009 reproduced article I wrote.  Enjoy….

Aquarium Husbandry (and attempts at pronunciation) of

ex-Cichlasoma grammodes

Scott Womack (April 2009)

“Grammodes”

I can certainly type the name, but damned if I’m sure of its pronunciation.

In the past, I have written a couple of articles on species that I have kept and bred, and for those, I tried to perform as much research as possible so that I can at least pretend to know what I am writing about.  But I have searched high and low for a phonetic spelling of “grammodes” with no luck…and it’s kind of bugging me.  I have asked some of my fish keeping friends about the pronunciation of “that fish” and I have received the following (pardon my own crude phonetic spelling):

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I really don't know why I tried this.

Today, while on a particularly boring conference call, I searched on iTunes using the keyword "cichlid" .

Wouldn't you know it, there is an album called Cichlid by the artist A Riley!

I only previewed one of the songs (they're all marked explicit) and its not really my taste.

There is one song called "Kill Myself" which I sometimes feel like doing when I can't get my fish to breed, but that's a story for another day.

Check out this link if you want to hear it for yourself.

If you attend GCCA swap meets, perused our forum, or browsed the GCCA Classifieds, you've probably come across someone called "Wilpir". 

I was looking at the Classifieds a couple of weeks ago and came across an ad from Wilpir for Lithochromis xanthopetryx fry. This unusual Victorian cichlid isn't easy to find! I had three females that and I was looking for some males. I quickly sent off a note to Wilpir to ask if he had any extra males. He did!

Wilpir's real name is Scott Reiser and he is an accomplished fishkeeper who lives in Oswego, IL. Oswego is well over fifty miles from my house, but I was driving down to Bloomington, IL for business and Oswego would conveniently be on the way back. Could I stop by?

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A few days ago, a site visitor emailed me (I'm the GCCA Webmaster) and asked why our Classifieds didn't have an "Email a link to this add" option like we did on our old system.

Fortunately, it's great to have help!

Associate Webmaster Jason made a change to our site that will make it easy to share GCCA pages you like via email, Facebook, Twitter and many other social services.

Look on the right side of our site for the Share button. It looks like this:

Once you click on the image, you'll get a menu of choices:

Click the choice you want, and you are good to go!

THE BALD TAX BLOG 

February 2012

Welcome!! You are reading the inaugural installment of The Bald Tax Blog!!  I hope to update this at the beginning of each month, day job permitting.  Selfishly, I intend on using this blog as a vehicle to journal my experiences with the fish I keep. Over the last few years, I have somewhat used the GCCA Forum as a means to this end, but I thought with the new online application our club has built-out, I would try and take advantage of documenting more. 

The other intent for this blog is (hopefully) to pass along my experiences to you, to help you set and reach your goals with this hobby and to avoid some of the mistakes and pitfalls I have encountered.  But please note, I do not consider myself a fish-keeping expert in any regard, but just an avid hobbyist who loves cichlids.  Ten years does not sound like a long time with any hobby, but with keeping cichlids, or any fish, you encounter many different situations and events as you progress with a species, and those situations and events add up very quickly.

Who am I?  My name is Scott Womack and I have been a member of the GCCA for 9 years.  I am a simple tax accountant who discovered cichlids in 2001. I kept community fish as a kid and once had a55 gallontank in my firstChicagoarea apartment.  But then I got married, we bought a house, had a couple of kids, and every now and then I found myself drawn back to fish-keeping.  When we bought our house in 1996, my priority was a basement, thinking I wanted the space for “something.”  A fish tank was one strong possibility that I considered.  I sometimes wonder whether I would have been keeping cichlids if we had bought a house with no basement.

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Although it was nearly a 50-mile drive, yesterday I bagged up some fish and headed out to the Greenwater Aquarium Society auction in Alsip.

I live in the north suburbs, so Alsip is a hike for me. My wife would say it's where "Yankel lost his left shoe." That said, Chicago is big and we really do need events that work for both north and south siders.

Greenwater is a general club and the auction appeared to be well-run and well-attended. The club uses a 10 table system so your sale items get divied up more or less equally. Unlike GCCA auctions, you can sell plants, equipments and non-fish. There were vintage air pumps-- in the original packaging-- plastic plants, microworm cultures, tanks and all sorts of stuff you don't see at a GCCA auction.

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I have started to spawn more and more cichlids and thought, it would be nice to share my approach and techniques for raising fry. This article will focus on the techniques and approaches that I have adapted to use to raise and grow out my fry. These techniques are simple and have been pretty successful, resulting in relatively good results. I like to keep things simple and easy and often look for the simplest and easiest way to be successful.

Credit has to given to the members of the GCCA club, as a lot of my experience comes from techniques shared to me by other club members.  I take no credit for any of these ideas as being original or being applicable in all circumstances.

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Fellow GCCA Member Jason let me know about the Marina Hang-on Holding and Breeding Box, raving about how useful this piece of equipment is for raising baby fish.

In fact, Jason wanted me to test them out so he gave me one. I later acquired another one at the GCCA Holiday Party gift exchange, so I thought it was probably about time I checked it out.

The Marina Box is very much like an air-driven power filter that hangs on the outside of your tank. The construction is good and the material is very clear plastic measuring 9.5 W X 3.5W X 5 deep. I tested the Large size box. On Amazon, this product is about $21. Smaller version are in the $14 range. I believe some wholesales offer them for less.

The product comes with a divider so you can separate some fry or perhaps a smaller adult fish on each side. One nice feature is the offsets on the bottom which allow you to easily adjust the offset of the unit from the tank so that it hangs perpindicular to the side of the tank.

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