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!