Felix: Excellent summary of the important issues. Yes, they would have loved Parosphromenus, but they were entirely unable to keep them alive, not to speak of successful breeding. They had no knowledge whatsoever on the specifics of blackwater aquaristics. Even the famous ichthyologist Michael Tweediei, curator of the fish section of the Raffles National Museum in Singapore at the beginning of the fifties (1950 …) kept for some times “Parosphromenus deissneri” (today we would probably say: P. alfredi or P. tweediei) in aquaria. He loved them, decribed them as “marvellous” when displaying, “the most beautiful of all small aquarium-fish I know”, but then he added (I cite it from the head): “There must be more skillfull aquarists than I am to keep them alive. After a few weeks the joy of life seems to fade out of their bodies, they become dull and die.”
This was the case until Dr. Walter Foersch exercised his famous experiments in the seventies and published them in the DATZ-journal 1974/75. Only then the Paro-aquaristics really began. All imports before were surely gone after some weeks time and no breeding was accomplished.
The
PAROSPHROMENUS PROJECT
