Now I go on with another aspect that the census has (unfortunately shown):
The quota of participants used to be great in the beginning when we were easily hitting the 50or 60 members that reported their stock. But over the years, we have lost ground there. This means that less people are reporting more animals since as we have learned already, the total amount of pairs has gone up in the same time.
Nevertheless, I am hoping that in the census which will soon be announced for April 2017, we will hit the 50 again and that this factor will improve in the future. I hope that I will be able to contribute to that by sharing this evaluation with you. Please mobilise everyone you know they do not participate usually to participate for the good of the liquorice gouramis.
I am now getting to the last part of this evaluation which focusses on some exemplary species. We have a few species and varieties that are kept and bred extremely well and this is amazing. However, Others are only present with a few members and it is likely that they might disappear in the near future. In the next plot, I summarise the situation of the whole number of species reported over the years.
The graph needs a little explanation:
We can see the amount of species that belong to the so called groups of endangerment. It is clear that the fewer pairs of one species is present, the more vulnerable this species or variety is. Therefore, we can see in the darkest red those species that are presently only represented by 1-3 breeding pairs. These might face extinction in captivity soon. The lighter the graph gets, the more pairs are reported. The other groups are 4-8 pairs, 9-20 pairs which is relatively safe and 21+ pairs. We find two trends here:
-firstly, more species are at the top. We never had so many species in more than 21 pairs and therefore mostly secure.
-on the other hand, there are also more species than ever in the lowest group.
This all goes hand in hand with the strongly reduced groups in the middle. Some species seem to find large popularity, perhaps these are also easily breedable. Others seem to vanish slowly but surely. We must therefore strengthen the “middle” so that more species will get to the top parts. and we must make sure that those strongly endangered species are bred again.
Now I want to end with a series of Graphs that show the development of the single species over the past two years. I want to stress you attention to five species i have marked yellow in the graphs.
These species, namely quindecim, phoenicurus, bintan, spec. aff. linkei Pangkaraya, rubrimontis and linkei, mostly from the commercial trade (ct.) have experienced the above mentioned development. They now account for more than 60% of the total stock of pairs as can be seen in the last graph from October 2016:
It is most remarkable that these five species and varieties are able to constantly keep at the good level. This is definitely a sign for actual success of the Parosphromenus project. However, as mentioned before, we must make sure that this species that are not so well represented in our stocks are constantly bred and find their way as for example rubrimontis has done.