Author: Jeremy Basch

Auction season is in full swing. There is an auction pretty much every weekend leading up to the week before Thanksgiving. A list of events is provided at the bottom of this post.

Now for some good news, the fishroom is starting to produce more regularly now that we have increased our R/O production. As you may recall in our last post, the drought from this year caused our hardness to spike to levels we have not seen before. We have since increased the amount of R/O we are using to compensate for this, and the fish are thriving. Right now, we have fry of several species including various Apistogramma, Hypancistrus, Hoplisoma, Duringlanis, and even our Symphysodon. Unfortunately, it does appear we missed our window on wild discus, better luck next year! Fingers crossed we continue to find success. Hope to see everyone at a fish event soon! We will have more news to share as we approach the new year.

https://youtu.be/ebS1PWXq7b8

Upcoming Fish Events:

To say the summer was rough is an understatement. We were quite dry along with all of the ongoing construction within our neighborhood, meant water quality tanked. Our hardness is up over 400ppm and as a result, hardly anything spawned this year.

As a result of the poor summer, we have upgraded our RO unit along with increasing the amount of storage we now have. The goal being to drop the hardness in all of our aquariums. It does seem like we are starting to see some success as two new groups of Hypancistrus zebra and our group of H. vandragti have spawned. We still have the goal of producing more zebras as we have known lineage with our fish. Our stock comes from wild stock we obtained the year before the species was banned from export out of Brazil. They were fish we had imported while working for a local pet store. Fingers crossed we are out of the worst of things!

Fall auction season is upon us! Next weekend is Pittsburgh’s auction: Auctions – GPASI.org. After that, we plan to attend our local club’s auction: CAFE—Columbus Area Fish Enthusiasts. Cincinnati has their auction on October 25th:    From there, it is the last event of the year, the Ohio Cichlid Association Extravaganza. Hope to see you at one of these or all of these special events! We can also offer presales for these events

In other news, we will be in Kansas City and Chicago next year. We are also looking at rebooking our talk in California. Due to some personal issues, we were unable to make it out west. Fingers crossed that we can finally make that happen next year! We also hope to bring fish along! Stay tuned!

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!

 

We are back from our trip to the Upper Rio Negro. It was a fantastic journey to a very unique place. Most people do not realize that the Upper Rio Negro is quite rocky with areas of sand and sunken trees. To say the area is very remote is an understatement. The only way to get there in a timely manner is to take a flight from Inirida. This is after several flights into Colombia.

Unfortunately, our group had to deal with several days of rain on the first portion of our trip. The area had already received several week’s worth of rain prior to our arrival. As a result, the river was quite high. Despite all of this, we were able to fish for several targets including: Ancistrus, Apistogramma, Biotodoma, Hypancistrus, Nannostomus, Rivulus, Satanoperca, and Tatia. Further complications occurred with getting the fish back to the states including our flight breaking down on our way out of San Felipe, Colombia. This forced the fish to remain an extra day in Inirida instead of forwarding on to Villavicencio. This along with other issues caused the loss of many fish. Ultimately, we only ended up with a fraction of the fish we intended to bring back.

However, we still have all of the memories and images and video of the trip. We will share more details of the trip in time. Right now, we are focusing on getting back into the swing of things here at home including work in our fishroom. Discus breeding season is upon us and one our pairs of discus presently have fry. Fingers crossed the parents can take care of them. Our next event will be the auction in Cinci, the GCAS Spring Auction. See everyone there!

Welcome to the New Year! This year may bring a lot of change for us. Our hope is to update a few items on the website as time permits. The goal being to provide more content in the form of articles and videos of our trips. These will not be super elaborate but hopefully a fun view in. The hope is to inspire the next generation of fish enthusiasts to get out there and see the world around us!

We are also expanding how we raise our baby discus. The plan is to provide auto water changes in several of our tanks. Thereby insuring a constant supply of new water for the ever-growing babies. Discus fry are not easy by any means. The quantities we raise will likely be still limited. We will see how things progress. Our wild discus should start spawning some time in February or March.

Happy holidays from Amazon Tropics. 2025 will be a big year for us as we will once again return to South America. Our group will be heading to a very remote area of Colombia along the upper Rio Negro. While a few aquarists have traveled to this area, they have only documented some of the cichlid and killifish species in the area. Other research papers have shared a variety of species found along the major river basins in and around the Rio Casiquiare. Our goal will be to document those same species along with other groups of fish including tetras and catfish.

In particular, we are interested in the Lebiasinidae,  Loricariids, Auchenipteridae, Callichthyidae, smaller cichlids of the genus Apistogramma, Laetacara, Wallaciia, some larger genera such as Aequidens, Geophagus, Heros, Hypselecara, and Satanoperca. The area we will be investigating happens to be near the area in which Ivanacara adoketa is found. Could this species be found in southern Colombia? Perhaps, we certainly hope to find it. From the family Auchenipteridae, a personal goal is to find Tatia strigata, which is known from the area.

The species that have been documented from the area previously also hold a large interest to us such as Liamosemion (Rivulus) staecki, the peacock killifish aptly named for its gorgeous coloration reminiscent of the bird it’s named after. To the north, we may find a related species, Liamosemion (Rivulus) flammaecauda. Another aptly named species with its strong striations (see www.itrainsfishes.net for images). There have also been several nice Apistogramma species noted from the area including a form of Apistogramma flabellicauda (see http://tomc.no).

Regardless of what we do find, this will be a trip of a lifetime! How many times does one get to go to such a remote place? A big thanks to Hernando Gil for making this trip possible. We will share more once we have returned! Up first though will be the Columbus Area Fish Enthusiasts (CAFE) Winter Swap January 25th. Go to: www.columbusfishclub.org for details! See everyone there!

Finally, it is beginning to feel like fall outside. The temperatures are dropping and so are the leaves. Autumn brings change and with it, the first wet weather in months has arrived. The area we live in is down nine inches this year. Rivers and creeks that once ran plentiful are down to just puddles. Hopefully this is not long lasting, but we certainly have noticed a change in our water quality. pH levels and water hardness are higher than ever, typical for a drought situation. Most of our fish have stopped reproducing but hopefully the change in weather will help.

As we come to the end of the year, the final fish events are upon us. The Ohio Cichlid Association Extravaganza is now in less than two weeks! This is the largest regional event and is attended by seasoned and new aquarists alike. If you truly want to learn about fish, be sure to go see the speakers. You will be stunned by all of the wonders of our world. Be sure to visit their website at: Ohio Cichlid Association for details.

With that, we will have a special list of available fish for this event. Please visit our http://www.amazontropics.com/availability-list/ page for everything we have available. Please note that some species are very limited on availability and pre-ordering we advised to secure those special fish. Hope to see everyone there!

It has been a summer to remember! We had a blast during the American Cichlid Association (ACA) convention a few months ago. It was great to see old faces and new. A big thanks to Greater Cincinnati Aquarium Society (GCAS) for hosting! You did a fantastic job as usual.

And while we dealt with some presentation issues, we were excited to share our journeys to South America. One aspect that I really enjoyed, was judging the catfish group in the fish show. The ACA now has a few catfish classes which makes sense as many folks keep catfish with their cichlids. This idea was first done by the Ohio Cichlid Association (OCA) and has been adopted.

We hope fish shows can continue but we do realize it is stressful for both the fish and the aquarist. Hauling a prized fish to just share it in a show for a few days requires a lot of preparation as well as a watchful eye during the convention. Thankfully GCAS had tanks ready to go for all the show fish. The water quality was pretty perfect, and we cannot recall seeing many issues. Again, a great job by everyone involved! We look forward to the next big convention.

Speaking of which, the OCA Extravaganza is fast approaching. We plan to be in attendance for this event and can bring fish. If you have not been to this event and are within driving distance, please try to attend. This is a great event with around 400 attendees. This is not just a cichlid convention either as there are a number of catfish speakers and vendors that carry everything from plants and shrimp to killifish and livebearers. For more details, please visit their website: https://www.ohiocichlid.com/extravaganza/extravaganza-info.

The other event we plan to attend is the GCAS Fall Auction. If you are looking for rare fish, this is a great auction to attend that always has a great variety of fish, plants and inverts. If you see anything on our availability list you are interested in, please contact us at: jeremybasch@gmail.com. We can make arrangements for pick up at either event.

And that brings us to our last announcement. For serious buyers only, we are going to sell a group of 1 1/2-1 3/4″ Hypancistrus zebra. These fish are F1/F2 crosses! That’s correct, these fish have wild Zebra Pleco genes from a fish we imported before the ban many, many, many years ago. There will be up to 8 fish available. Please check our Fish Availability page for further details. Below are some images of the fish available for purchase. These fish are for pick up only at either the GCAS Fall Auction or the OCA Extravaganza. We will not be offering shipping so please do not ask.

Over the last several months we have been busy in the fishroom. We are working on moving fish around for more grow out space along with tanks for our pairs of discus. So far, we are at around ten 20H gallon aquariums that are ready for fry. The end goal will be twenty aquariums in total. This number may grow however as our needs change.

Our fish have also been busy. Our Apistogramma continue to produce offspring. Several notable species have started to reproduce including Apistogramma sp. “Abacaxis”, A. sp. “D37” and A. sp. “D39”. Other classic and iconic species also have fry, A. cacatuoides and A. agassizii. Most exciting might be that we now have a proven pair of discus, Symphysodon sp. from Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira. We have shared previous photos of each parent fish. More details about our discus can be found here: http://www.amazontropics.com/cichlidae/

Other updates include we are quite busy with the local fish club attempting to revive some of the fun activities of old. We have a rather full calendar and hope you can join us for some of these events. The next event we will be at will be the CAFE Swap next Saturday, May 11th. But we have other fun events planned including a club fishing trip and a fishroom crawl.

After this event, we will be the guest speaking at the OCA Extravaganza in June. We are filling in and helping as Lew Carbone assisted us with auctioneering duties last fall. If you happen to be in the area, please be sure to stop by. Details for this event can be found at the following link: Ohio Cichlid Association. Lastly, we will be guest speaking at the pillar of the aquarium hobby conventions at the American Cichlid Association convention in Cincinnati, OH. I highly encourage everyone to attend this event especially if you are within driving distance. This is one of the premier events in the country with guest speakers from all over. Our goal is also to bring some new and unusual species along for ride down to Cinci. Hope we see you there!

***Please note that the talk in Cleveland for OCA will not be the same talk that we present in Cincinnati for ACA.***

With all of the fish breeding, our fish availability should be very interesting in the coming months. Keep checking back for updates. For now, our fish availability list is up to date.

Last, we leave you with news that we now have juveniles from our Corydoras sp. “CW107”! We collected this species in the Rio Cudaryi, a tributary of the Rio Vaupes near Mitu, Colombia. We think you will like this lovely colored female, enjoy!

 

Well it is almost spring, and we have not had a chance to post in recent months. The fishroom has kept us quite busy with baby fish and normal maintenance. We are currently working more with Apistogramma and Corydoras but fear not as we plan to keep plugging away at other groups of fish soon. Additionally, Jeremy has taken on the president duties of the local fish club once more. Add to that a day job now working on some project work and you can see why we have been unable to post very much.

If that was not enough, we are also hard at work on our presentation for the Catfish Study Group’s annual convention. This is a meeting of the great catfish minds that takes place every year in the United Kingdom. We are truly honored to be going this year after having to cancel last year due to illness. It should be a jam-packed weekend with lots of talk on all things catfish. We cannot wait to meet everyone and talk about the fish we love so much! We hope to see everyone in England for this great event. If you happen to see us, please be sure to stop over and say hello! For now, here is sneak peek on the presentation we are working on.