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As we told at other places here in the website of the P-P or in the Finke-Hallmann-book, there are many different methods that have proven to be successful. The Bussler-method of taking the cave with the eggs or the young fry is only one, you can do just the opposite (take the adults out) or even leave everything at its place. The latter one is the most easy and interesting method, but a bit risky as long you do not know how the special pair behaves. But one should test that out. If they spawned once, they will spawn a second and a third time if good conditions prevail. It may go on for weeks. However: Do not think this will go on for months, and thnking next year they will spawn as they did this one maybe wrong. The causes why this may not be the case are not fully clear by now. It is a good advice to grow some offspring up as early as possible.
If you separate the clutch from the father, you renounce of the father’s care for the eggs and later on his care for the young larvae. This is by no means without meaning, especially in the small tank with stagnant water and nearly always many germs. Mostly, a part of the eggs fail to develop, become white and die and infect others. This is prevented by the father’s care very efficiently. So, Bernd’s method is possible, but do not part them too early.
Dear Maurice, you are very welcome here and I hope you get some good informations for your hobby. But Parosphromenus aquaristics is quite a bit more complicated and ambitious than normal aquaristics. Therefore you found that information on bacteria in a general forum for normal aquaristics using tap water. If you have a water nearly without any mineral content and a pH clearly in the acid sphere, things are different than from normal aquaria. There are, for instnace, other bacteria working than in harder water with a pH around 7.0.
So everything is quite in order, and you are welcome here to learn about an aquaristics outside of the normal hobby. But very interesting, opening a glimpse im the highly endangered world of the south-east Asian blackwater organisms adapted to extreme water conditions.
Are you interested in blackwater aquaristics or not? If you are, general aquarium forums don’t help at all. They care about normal tap water aquaristics and fish that are mostly not endangered at all.
If you want seriously explore the maintenance of blackwater aquaria, you cannot learn much from those site. Read our fundamental informations to be found in the texts of the menue at the left side, not in this forum. Ans read the book “Prachtguramis” by Finke and Hallmann, and you will discover a world different to that. I did not write that book without a background of forty years of theory and practice.
Personally, I have no filter at all in my 35 small tanks of 12 liters each. But a small sponge filter driven by air is not wrong. But weekly water changing is advisable nevertheless. The water must be near to destilled, without any calcium, the pH should be held constant between 3.0 and 6.0, according to the species. All experts have no problems with this. The dogmas of the normal scene are copied from the normal aquarium literature and that is totally ignoring blackwater aquarium keeping. Many of their doctrines do not apply to this. As do many of the products of the hobby industry.
Forget it if you are seriously interested in Paros. Think about if you are. If you are indeed, try with relatively hardy species first that are not extremely endangered.
Dear all, there are developments in this Pulau Lingga-affair that are very good indeed. The contact that Bill figured out to Mr. Nakamoto is excellent. I just wrote to Prof. Dr. Peter Beyer from Freiburg university; he is a good friend. I gave his private mailing address to Bill and David. Feel free, to contact him directly.
I think the idea of a meeting in Singapore that has been suggested are excellent and very much hope that they could be realized. Additionally, I am very pleased about the fact that Mr. Nakamoto understands and writes English. For the problem with the Team Borneo-people is that they cannot or at least are not willing to do it. The only one involved I have no contact to up to now is Lawrence Kent; I very much hope this will change now soon.
I shall forward this at the same time privately to four of the five people involved, including Peter Beyer, not to Mr. Nakamoto, I am sorry, whose mailing address is unknown to me.
I am very happy about these possibilities and perspectives. It is one of the moments when I think it was worthwhile to start that project.
Best wishes, PeterBill is right, we don’t have sufficient informations.
As far as I know, a Paro-species from Pulau Lingga has not been known hitherto. Neither to Horst nor to Martin nor to Allan nor to Olivier nor to Dietrich no to others, including myself. On the other hand, most experts are sure that there are places not investigated in this respect up to now. Who travels to Pulau Lingga? Nearly nobody. And there are many other small islands around that possibly could reveal Paros if anyone would search for them. If – that would be the precondition – there are small rivers, peat-bogs and some remaining rainforest. They are less in danger to be destroyed for agricultural land and palm oil-plantations because of their difficult attainability and smallness. It’s economically unattractive.
RM Nakamoto is unknown to me. I cannot say whether he belongs to the “Team Borneo” or not. His name has been never mentioned by them. Michael Lo is no member of the “Team Borneo”. He is a Chinese living in Sarawak, the Team-people are Japanese living in Japan. Of course, he knows them and – maybe – has travelled together with them, but he is not part of their organisation.
A pity that our Asian forum is so inactive! We must try to get a personal change there, as soon as possible.
David and Bill, I shall inform Horst when he is back from China, since he formerly had good contacts to the Japanese people around Hiroyuki Kishi. In fact, I received my first P. pahuensis some years ago via him from Hiroyuki Kishi who had caught them himself in eastern Borneo.
Their “invisibility” is a great problem. They once had a living website, but it is gone or nearly gone nowadays. I do myself not know whether the “Team Borneo” still exists or not. I had some contacts with them preparing our Paro-book. But it was always difficult.
One of the inhibiting problems is language. I had myself many problems in communication with Hiroyuki and his friends because nobody is capable of good English, let alone German. And I am not of Japanese.
We have indeed not seen Paros from the island of Pulau Lingga hitherto. It is not suprising that there are some occuring. Thinking of the past 10.000 years it was included in the big landmass of Sundaland, now being an island between western Malaysia and Sumatra, just like Bintan or Bangka.
Let’s see if we get more pictures. This one shows the fish not in full but in in frightened colours. The location is new to us; whether the species is too, one such picture is not enough. But many thnak to you, David, for posting it. The Japanese have played since some decades an important role in Paro aquaristics. They found pahuensis or spec. Parengean a little earlier or later than Europeans.
Stefanie, I am sorry but you are wrong. I criticize the state of the Paro-taxonomy, nothing else. And what I say about ornithology is a fact of the history of science. Read Dominik Mahr, Fortschritt oder Rückfall? in: P. Finke (Hg.), Freie Bürger, freie Forschung. Die Die Wissenschaft verlässt den Elfenbeinturm. München: oekom 12105, 119-123. There we have another context, but this does not make my critique invalid. Many museum have big and valuable collections of bird skins, many of them were added recently, and I do not criticize that. But the modern science of birds would not have developed as it has if the methods of dealing with dead birds would have remained the same up to now. I don’t criticize that dead fish or birds are collected in the museums. But I criticize that our hitherto descriptions of the Paro-species are not on the level that is comparable to other taxa. Even the museum ornithology has advanced since long from describing corpses to another, advanced level. If we took behaviour (not to speak about the genes) as containing valuable additional information, ornaticauda and parvulus would probably not retain that status they have today. Not to speak about sumatranus.
I see that you say similar things, of course. But there is a remarkable progress made by many taxa that has – at least for our Paros – not been made up to now by including all the other important information not to be seen at the phenotype level. I do not state that I could it do better. But I state as a researcher on science in general the revision of the Paro-taxonomy including all that other informations is necessary. Fortunately there are people working on that.You are wrong in thinking that I “condemn” the museum taxonomy. I condemn it to be the only method, sufficient for describing new soecies of Paros scientifically. That means quite some restrictions: They could perhaps be suffient today for some organisms, even fish, that had not been detected and described before. Even birds. But in most cases that are relevant today it is entirely insufficent. And this is the case with Paros who only can be distinguished by slight differences in structure and colouring. Yes, even slight structural differences may occur and not indicate a species difference. May, not more.
You condemn, namely my way of speaking, I do not. The way I spoke was short for “entirely insufficient for describing new species of Paros in cases where only slight differences in structure and colouring are to be seen at the phenotypes”. Let alone the dead phenotypes.
All we know hitherto is that Parosphromenus is a highly variable genus still in heavy development at the present day. The new taxonomics that is used in birds for instance knows semispecies for instance, but uses has genetic informations in the background. Even the old concept of a subspecies is not used in Kottelat’s world, too. But he can’t, I admit, not using living fish, their behaviour, genetics. And that is not enough, I am sorry.
Yes, Helene is fully right in decribing these difficulties. When I wrote the Parobuch “Prachtguramis” together with Martin Hallmann, we quarreled a lot about the question which fish Dr. Walter Foersch had got by Dietrich Schaller, who caught them for him after having visited Dr. Alfred, at that time (1975) head of the Raffles museum in Singapore. I had myself seen these fish in Dr. Foersch’s fishroom, indeed I had got some pairs of his offspring from him for myself, my first Paros. We all called them “deissneri” at that time, but nearly forty years later writing that book it was entirely clear: they had certainly not been deissneri but something between rubrimontis, alfredi and tweedie. I voted for tweediei although the fish showed more blue than the purely red we knew at that time from the typical tweediei. Martin voted for a mix between rubrimontis and alfredi, and in the end we decided for that spec. Kota Tinggi. It was Allan Brown who had given us fish that he had caught in the Kota Tinggi-region, and indeed, they resembled most the pictures left showing the offspring of Foersch’s fish.
But what does that mean for the question alfredi-tweedei-rubrimontis? I tell you what: Dr. Kottelat, who did the scientific descriptions of these three species only lately, in 2005, decided from dead museum specimens to distinguish these three species. It’s the same problem we know from ornithology: The old science of the birds was a pure museum-science. People shot the birds and then science began: measuring, weighting, describing the bodies and so on. We can thank god that this has ended by the protest of many laymen in the late 19. century! But in our fish, we still have that museum-taxonomy. That is the problem. As long as an outdated method of describing new small fish defines the species, we are often incapable of to determine rightly our living fish that has not been assigned with undoubtedly true a location.
The question remains open whether the fish we call spec. Kota Tinggi and which has come the uncertain ways of the trade is a fish more akin to alfredi or more akin to something else. If the location would be clear this would point to the nearness of alfredi, and that strengthens the position of Martin’s. But we do not know anything about locations in this case and the original locations are anyhow destroyed nowadays; we can be happy if we still find Paros somewhere near to them. The catchers of these fish here in question must have used such unknown new locations. But the real problem is that the hitherto scientific knowledge forces us to decide between those three species, what in truth is probably an intermediate form not decribed scientifically.
My conclusion is threefold: 1. We have nice fish and are happy that they still can be found, although nearly all great traditional locations around are destroyed for ever; 2. In this case the determination spec. Kota Tinggi is the most likely one, but to call this cf. alfredi is an open question; and 3. We need new methods of taxonomy, definitely including genetic methods. From all we know from this research up to now, the genetic differences between alfredi, rubrimontis and tweedie are so small that a genetic researcher would not have splitted these three into fully developed species. They may represent developing species, but nowadays the economic destruction of the Malayan countryside puts for ever an end to this development.
Indeed, young Paros could grow up slowly and fastly. I always was used to the impression of slowliness, but my experience was limited. It was confined to my own methods and that of some fellow-Paroists, and these methods were that of extensive breeding. But then I came across quite the contrary. Especially Horst Linke is a master in growing young fish much faster than others, and that depends on intensive feeding, water care and much room for each individual. I was always impressed how quick his young fish grew. I often received Paros from him of which he said to be half a year of age, but they were adult, showing their full colours, mated and bred. My own fish always needed double the time or more. I remember especially some P. tweediei which were rather larger, but according to him only half a year. And this was surely true. Compared with fish by Günter Kopic or Bernd Bussler they were giants and those of them and myself dwarfs.
But there was an opposite truth, too. These large fish did not live very long. The explication for the fastness of their growth was Horst’s aim to have good photographs of them (which we can view in his publications); time and space was money and fast growth a necessity. Put however into “normal” tanks for a “normal” Paro-life-circle they died earlier than many others. Günter Kopic had a male P. deissneri for more than eight years, and it bred until its seventh. Horst’s young became adult in a hurry, but grew old in the same quick ratio.
I can imagine that the fish shown by friend Ekona are indeed ten weeks.
I should remind you of the fact that the decision on the sex is in some aninmals (including fish) not determined by the genetics in the moment of fertilization, but much later by environmental factors. I wrote about this several times already, including this website. In Germany, the biologist Steinberg has investigated and published on this issue especially in the case of fish. This is an issue of high importance to the fish industry for in many cases of species it is of great importance for breeders of fish we need as our food to produce more females (eggs!)than males (milk!). There is no doubt in general; the difficulty lies in finding out which factor is responsible in an individual case situation.
The most important factors that have been found to be relevant for this in fish are the pH, the share of humic substances, the temperature and the general composition of minerals. This explains spawns with dominating or pure males resp. females. Every group of fish has its own optimal balance of these factors. Differences among the Parosphromenus species exist, too, but they are slight only.
As a matter of practical help every breeder is advised not to start a specific breeding with extreme values that are conveniant for him or her (e.g. lowest or highest possible pH resp. temperature, no humic substances or abundance of them, or an unusual composition of the mineral contents, for instance by using a water with too high a share of Ca) but to prepare the set up well informed about the ecological situation at the original locations. Generally speaking, too many spawns are performed in water with too high a mineral share, too high a pH, too low a share of humic substances and to high a temperature. Mind, that the pH of the tropic waters in blackwater regions are never without a high share of humic substances, are often of lower temperature in the rainy seasons of mating and rearing the young, when the mineral content of the water is most similar to pure H2O.
Dear David, I fully agree with you; we cannot exclude all these species, and I add: We cannot exclude something else. What we learned from the “Mimbon 98”-case was: Most similar to alfredi, but possibly a very similar variant. Without any reliable informations on the location we are bound to keep silent on this question. We can surely exclude phoenicurus, for wild phoenicurus always had this slightly elongated caudal. (They lost this feature in the secnd or third filial generation, indicating that possibly phoenicurus is still veryay near to tweediei. More we are unable to say).
I understand your interest in giving the beautiful fish a name, but we can’t. We can only observe and describe the fish in all behavioural situations as acutely and most differentiated as possible, and you do so. That’s the speciality of your fine descriptions. Even if we receive further informations about the locality we might not be able to decide the question, but we could exclude either Kalimantan-species or Malaysia-species.
In the last run even the young descriptions from 2005 (by Kottelat and Ng) are not certain for all times. Without clear data from genetic instigations we cannot state such slight species differentiations for all times. The taxonomic means of these taxonomists are – outdated, sorry.
In your fine video the fish look less similar to P. spec. Parengean resp. spec. Palangan, and more like tweediei with much blue in the anal fin. The red in the female unparired fins ist typical for female tweediei in courtship colours.
Dear “Ekona”, in Hamburg I suggested an internationally conceived book of the Parosphromenus-project, including the Asian tragedy of the ever growing quiet plantations of the palm-oil-industry instead of the loud rainforest with its boosting biodiversity, with subeditors in Asia, America and Europe, two main editors (Helene and me) and some authors distributed over the world.
And we need good photographers of the landscape and our fish; that means we need e.g. Michael Lo and we need you.
