Paros in Italy

Dear Massimo, you are very welcome with the Parosphromenus-Project! Until now, there are not many Italian members; please write to our webmaster that she should send you their names and addresses.

I am very much in favour of your suggestion to prefer private ways of exchanging fish and ideas and exclude the commercial level as much as possible; we really don’t need it (at least to far an extent) as far as Paros are concerned. This matches with my conviction that the commercial exploitation of the aquarium hobby bears many negative aspects; the P-P is a path towards a critical debate that we need on it.

An important point of our project is to preserve privately caught fish with secure locations (= definite location-forms of non-mixed species) by breeding and private distribution. Unfortunately, sometimes such forms are nevertheless lost and commercially traded fish replace them. But the project has a long-term breath and starts anew when an expedition has been successfully brought some forms home again.

We are proud to say that at least some species/forms could be saved until now by this policy, e.g. quindecim, pahuensis, spec. Ampah and spec. Lundu (= soec. Sungai Stunggang). Unfortunatly, the true deissneri is (nearly) lost; there is one pair left only, regularly spawning but no young are produced. We hope that we are soon able to go to Bangka for some new pairs, for that species has never been traded at all. And it is urgent, since the pollution of the habitats on Bangka is heavy and disastruous.

Dear Massimo, I am admiring your firm and conscious critical thinking, and I wish you and your friends the very best. This – concentrating on the roots of the hobby and opposing its being dominated by values of the market – is essentially what I think is the path towards the future.

Your rules for the tanks are – may I say – a bit rigid; I am in favour of them but they are hardly to be realized fully with Paros. I do not know any specialist for these fish who is able to do without Artemia, although it would be fine if one could dispense oft it. But this is not central to your main point. Most certainly, Paros are a wonderful group to learn a maximum independancy for the hobby from the market.

Go on! If we can, we shall try to help you! Peter

Dear Massimo, full support and affirmation.

As far as breeding is concerned, we have a clear tendency towards your suggestions. But: It is necessary that at least some breeders try to breed special species/forms from time to time in greater numbers. Otherwise we could not satisfy the wish of beginners to receive these fish.

A specially successful form of breeding is practised by or friend Bernhard Lukiewski (Berlin). He has focussed his breeding-system on a few fish only, among them only one species of Parosphromenus (P. quindecim). He could offer fish of any age at any time. There has been no aspects of degeneration, although all is done from a single pair about 15 years ago. in other cases breeding has been proved to become extremely difficult from the third or fourth generation onwards. But I suppose this has been due to mistakes (less water changing, food problems, negligance) which the breeders were responsible for, too.

In general, your ideas match mine grosso modo. I wish you full success in Italy.

Hello Mazzimo

Thank you for keeping us updated on the development in Italy.
It sounds really good, – I know how much it takes to prepare something like this. Please keep us updated also on how it goes.
I took part in something like it two years ago, – and there were some good respons to it. I made some good contacts there.
I am glad to see you have got p. phoenicurus also.
The gunawani sounds interesting ? Are you sure they are gunawani ? 🙂 I bought some last year in Denmark with the label p. gunawani, – there were not that though.