We hope everyone is having a great spring! It has been a very wet spring for us here in the Midwest. We have received nearly 17.5 inches of rain this year which is well above the average for the year. We’ve been lucky as being part of the outer edge of the really heavy rain that the south has been facing. Hopefully the heavy rains will subside.
All this rain however mimics the wet season that many of our tropical fish experience themselves. Interestingly, the Orinoco basin has its rainy season during our summers and the Amazon basin during our winters. The area we visited in February which is between the two basins, appears not to have an exact wet and dry season. That said, the weather can only be somewhat predictable and every river basin in the world can experience inconsistent rain fall.
With all of the rain currently, it is promoting a lot of fish spawning. It has been a strange year in the fishroom with some fish coming to life magically and others that have spawned regularly in the past, hardly breeding at all. Our Corydoras for instance, have produced few spawns outside of Osteogaster sp. “Green Laser” and Hoplisoma weitzmani. Additionally, our two wild discus pairs have each only spawned once. Both pairs appear to be young and thriving. We will continue to try different things to get them to go. Most recently a deep cleaning of the tanks were conducted. Next we will try Indian almond leaves, new live foods and may ultimately change out the RO unit that we believe may be giving us some issues.
That said, a few of our domesticated discus have started producing fry including our cobalt blue and blue diamond pair. The female blue diamond has hints of ocean green in her we hope will continue to come out in her offspring. The other pair that has started to produce is our leopard and leopard snakeskin pair. This is one of our favorite tank strains of discus. Most of the offspring will be leopard but we could see a few snakeskin.
Our ultimate goal is cross these discus back to wild fish and therefore create a better body shape to the fish. For years now, it has been our concern that no back crossing has been occurring. We have seen countless fish with poor shape appear on the market and even place in shows. A true cross back to a few strains would really introduce stable bloodlines and create better shaped discus.
We can’t share too much just yet on this project but we are slowly getting to where we want to be. We promise to share more as things come along. Everyone stay dry and keep up with those water changes!
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