X couchianus

[GaryofMontreal]

I finally managed to find some Xiphophorus couchianus, and if all goes well, I'll be picking them up this weekend. As I set up tanks, I've been reading. I've found a gap when it comes to temperature for this fish. Baensch says 81f, but I find Baensch often recommends really warm temps for fish that don't need that. I can crank their tank to 81, but I'd rather not if I don't have to. What temps have people kept them at?
When I look at average temperatures for Monterrey, it's hot in the summer but right now, it's in the 50s F. It gets cooler than that.

[OldMan]

Gary, I would start by asking the person you are getting them from. That person will know where they have been keeeping the fish. Although that value may not be ideal, at least you will know it can exist at that value.

[Melody]

Aqualog: Room temp (68-72F)

Livebearing Aquarium Fishes: 75-79F

If what I'd do helps at all, I'd keep them at room temp and if they seemed unenthusiastic about breeding I'd bring them up to 75. They're isolated from other Platy populations but not far removed and Platy's are very temp tolerant/adaptable. I would guess that hobby bred fish would be kept in the mid-seventies to 78 like the average tropical.

They were first found in Rio Catarina:

Summer in Santa Catarina occurs between November and March, when the temperatures normally range between 90°F (30°C) during the day and decreases to 75°F (24°C) during the evening. In few occasions the temperature may reach up to 100°F (38°C) throughout the day and around 80°F (28°C) during the evening.

The period from June to August is considered winter, when the daily temperature stays around 70°F (21°C). It can be a little bit chili during the evening, when the temperature drops to 59°F (15°C). On the mountains, it is very common that the temperatures will range between 63° F (17°C) and 40°F (5°C).

The typical rain season in Santa Catarina occurs in September and October, and in April and May. But it is also common that it rains for some 15 to 30 minutes in the summer, a short rain fall that normally occurs in the late afternoon. The positive side of the rain is that it refreshes the air and maintains the green environment. ~Santa Catarina Travel

... but of course, they've been in captivity for a very long time so it probably has little to do with their requirements now. There's also water depth to consider as they could stay very cool during hot temp's and vice versa.

I'm glad to hear that you found some, best of luck!

[CACAdmin]

Glad you found some, Gary. I hope they do well for you.

[GaryofMontreal]

I was able to speak to the breeder last night, and he keeps the species at 22-24. That's good news because with my furnace and water heating sitting right off the fishroom, the upper rack tanks hover at 22-23, even though the house thermostat (and house temp) is at 19.
I hate using aquarium heaters, especially since the more recently manufactured ones I've bought tend to burn our rather quickly compared to what was previously sold. You don't want to trust a valuable species to them unless you have a back-up on hand, and an electronic temperature gauge flashing its numbers at you every time you pass the tank.
Now, all I have to do is get the fish - I'm picking them up in Ottawa while I'm there on a family thing, but we're supposed to get 15 cm of snow..:frown:

[CACAdmin]

Drive safely... we want both you and your new fish to arrive home safely.

[GaryofMontreal]

The fish are here and so am I. In fact, as I write, the snowstorm seems to be here too. Life in Canada.
X couchianus aren't quite as ugly as I'd remembered them - an added bonus. I also picked up some very young X birchmanni, some beautiful Belize helleri and a Goodeid, C pardalis. Christmas came early this year!:laugh:

[PPulcher]

The things we do for fish! Good score on the fish, Gary. Now that I know your secret source, I may hop on that bandwagon too ;)

[GaryofMontreal]

Andrew,
Just contact him through his postings on the OVAS website - like a lot of breeders of rare fish, he doesn't like his name flying around because people who want fish can be very aggressive about it. I've had killie calls at 11:30pm, and people basically ordering me to send or deliver fish. It gets weird sometimes. You get mistrustful.
If people have your full name, it's not hard to get your phone number. I had a guy call me for info on a dwarf cichlid a few years ago. Soon after, he called for discus info, then for help getting a job, tips on killing kitchen rats, marital problems, and finally (thank goodness) for advice on moving to Alberta...
I can see why people want to screen calls and use internet pseudonyms...

[Melody]

I can certainly understand his thought process there. If it's who I think it is, he's always up for a trade too and that's always a lot more fun.

Some very nice species ya got there Gary. Birchmanni are one of my fave Swords.:yes:

Are you not travelling over Christmas due to the weather? I was fretting about that this morning as I read the weather report for your area and the Maritimes. :wideeyed:

[GaryofMontreal]

We had a good one today - not the worst accumulation but swirling winds to liven things up. This has been a very bad winter for road ice so far - quite striking.
We'll get a weather window to go before Christmas. I love the internet - you can track weather forecasts all the way along the road.

[Melody]

I think you should just stay home - I have enough to worry about...lol.

[GaryofMontreal]

The thread bobs back to the surface - thanks to the fact I was able to get such healthy adult specimens, I now have X. couchianus fry! I set the tank up with a lot of 2-3 inch round rocks along the bottom to provide cover, so I can't count them, but I've seen at least ten. And one of the two females should drop within the next week.

It's always nice to see fry from any fish, but these guys join my Zoogeoneticus tequila as the fish I celebrate when they breed, given the fact both could be extinct in nature.

:smile:

[Katalyst]

Andrew,
Just contact him through his postings on the OVAS website - like a lot of breeders of rare fish, he doesn't like his name flying around because people who want fish can be very aggressive about it. I've had killie calls at 11:30pm, and people basically ordering me to send or deliver fish. It gets weird sometimes. You get mistrustful.
If people have your full name, it's not hard to get your phone number. I had a guy call me for info on a dwarf cichlid a few years ago. Soon after, he called for discus info, then for help getting a job, tips on killing kitchen rats, marital problems, and finally (thank goodness) for advice on moving to Alberta...
I can see why people want to screen calls and use internet pseudonyms....

Congrats on the fry!

And um the guy your speaking of now lives in Ontario has my phone number and calls here no less then 3 times a day. I have turned off my answering machine and made my self invisible on several forums because of this person and my phone is STILL ringing. :SomebodyShootMe: :cry:

[CACAdmin]

Congrats on the fry Gary. Great to know too that you have another female ready to drop soon as well. :Smile:

[Melody]

That's fantastic! It's so important to keep these populations going in captivity and it does my heart good to see hobbyists taking that responsibility seriously. I look forward to trading endangered/threatened fish with you someday so I'll get in line.:wink:

[Melody]

Shouldn't we be seeing pictures of these by now? Hmmm? :Waiting:

[firestorm]

Shouldn't we be seeing pictures of these by now? Hmmm? :Waiting:

I was thinking the exact same thing :smile:

Glad i'm not a well known breeder.........yet. I try not to call breeders too much, instead I usually send them a pm on a forum or email them if I have an address for them. I wouldn't want to call and bug them when they're in the middle of something
:nah:

[Melody]

I am planning to keep these endangered Platy's soon so I did a little surfing for info to ensure that I could keep them properly. For one thing, my species tank space is seriously limited. With domestic Platy's and Swordtails in most of my other tanks, I had to find out if I could maintain a population in a smallish environment. Luckily they should do just fine in a 20G-long, and I can set up grow-out tanks as required.

I found a .pdf article written by keeper Gerald Griffin and since I know several members will also be keeping this fish, I thought it might be of interest. He covers both their status and care in captivity.

The Monterrey Platy - Xiphophorus couchianus (http://www.okcaa.org/articles/monterrey.pdf)

This is my first endangered Platy so I'm pretty pumped about having the opportunity to keep them. I can share the offspring with schools so they can be used as examples in species preservation lessons. I would also like to give some to our local club for distribution and hopefully inspire them to adopt other preservation projects. It's exciting to see Canada involved in species preservation. For a long time we simply couldn't get the fish. Another entire country working towards a tomorrow for endangered fish can significantly impact their chances of indefinite survival.:yes:

[susankat]

Gerald is in the same club that I belong to. At one time we all had a massive die off of the monterrey platy and that is the reason behind getting some more into the club. One thing that was decided is to add some new fish to the pool at intervals to help maintain healthy specimans.

[Lisachromis]

Actually, the stock that the ALA handed out when it was the SMP fish, came from a local club member in our club (SAS). It's too bad he doesn't ship. He's a very good breeder that can do almost any fish you give him. He still has tons of the fish. If someone asks about them, he's always saying "Do you want some? I've got lots."
So you could say that this species is well represented in the country.

[CACAdmin]

It's too bad he doesn't ship as I think the key to maintaining a species is to have many fishkeepers all across the country breeding these fish. This is because individual fishkeepers stocks and indeed those in an entire area can be wiped out by things beyond our control (i.e. the ice storm in Montreal a number of years ago). Thus the need for broad cross-Canada representation.

[GaryofMontreal]

I'm intrigued by your comment about the massive die off of couchianus in your area. There's something weird with the fish. I have a solid healthy-looking thirty from my original five, but the original five wiped in a night. Clean, stable water, apparently good food - nothing I can pin down. Just a sudden, calamitous wipeout of the breeders that didn't affect a single one of the young fish in the group. I have enough not to worry, or where I wouldn't worry if I knew what had gone wrong.
It was similar to what happened with branneri the first time I had a bunch of fry sexing out. But branneri has a rep for that, and they were fry. This couchianus mystery has been perplexing me since it happened a few weeks ago.
It's not a fish you'd want to keep in just one tank.

[CACAdmin]

You got me thinking, Gary. There are so many air-borne ane water-borne organisms and contaminents these days that it could be just about anything that caused the death of the adults. And maybe the fry being younger simply could adapt or have better ability to fight something off.

Although, we can test and treat our water, we don't actually have control of the general water supply. Levels of contaminents vary on a daily basis. It's tested and maintained to an acceptable level of purity for human consumption, that's all.

As for the air, it's something we cannot control. The impurties in it (especially for those of us living in cities) are staggering. By the very nature of a aquarium and filtration, the water in the tank is exposed to the air, absorbing not only oxygen but with it impurities and potential toxins. An elevation in something those particular fish are more susceptible to could be the cause.

There is sometimes simply just no way of knowing what the trigger was. I'm just happy your fry weren't affected. But as you say all the more reason for us to keep not only one tank ...and for the species to be spread out among as many fishkeepers as possible.

[susankat]

From what I have seen and read on a few different sites, including the one in Mexico a lot of it has to do with genetic diversity. The more inbreeding that happens the weaker the fish get. I do know that they don't have a long life span which I think is about 1 to 1 1/2 years which may be why you lost your original breeding stock.

I had over a couple of hundred along with a few other people having some and they were all lost at about the same time frame. I spoke with one of the collectors in Norway about this and was told that we needed to add new fish at least once a year to keep the stock healthy. Which I believe since inbreeding happens so much that it weakens the fish. Guppies are a good example of this. I have also seen what to much inbreeding can do to angels, causing several types of deformatives.

On a good side note, the collection site has been cleaned up and the fish are being slowly introduced back into the site, so hopefully in the not to far distant future they will be taken off the endangered list.

[Melody]

I wondered if the writer was part of your club Susan. He is a valuable resource and evidently focused on seeing these projects succeed. I admire that kind of selfless dedication a great deal. Clubs who have members like yourselves really seem to have their priorities straight and they do a lot of good.

Inbreeding quite often is misunderstood, so it's dismissed with all sorts of examples of hobby fish that came from one pair a zillion years ago. The danger is the same with trait breeding - you have just as much chance of making a bad gene dominant as you do of having the gene you desire become dominant. If you maintain two or more lines of fish, even if they're from the same pair initially, you reduce the chances of having undesirable genes emerge because all of the population shouldn't be carrying the recessive. Then you can cross the lines later. Some people may get a pair and niether fish is carrying that nasty recessive, so their population remains stable when someone else's dies off. You can trade amongst yourselves and still benefit, even if the fish are from the same source.

It's intriguing that it happens so quickly though. I wonder if the Stock Centre or a university would be open to examining the fish this happens to? I hope it never happens again but if you knew about it before hand, you could freeze them for shipping. Since the fish are endangered, they could justify their involvement. Obviously it had nothing at all to do with your fishkeeping if you had hundreds, Susan, evidently you did a wonderful job with them. You must have been positively ill when it happened, poor girl.

The water supply theory also has merit - some wild-types are more sensitive to chloramine than others, for example, and many water supplies will up the dose if the bacteria levels spike. Not all conditioners tackle chloramine and the doseage is for the average amount so sometimes it takes more. Fry will often cope with anything that reduces oxygen levels because they don't require as much and as mentioned, they are generally more adaptable than adults.

Actually, the stock that the ALA handed out when it was the SMP fish, came from a local club member in our club (SAS). It's too bad he doesn't ship. He's a very good breeder that can do almost any fish you give him. He still has tons of the fish. If someone asks about them, he's always saying "Do you want some? I've got lots."
So you could say that this species is well represented in the country.

I was contacted when the ALA went looking for stock as they knew someone in Canada maintained the population. It took them ages to find them here and if I didn't know fishkeepers in every little corner of Canada, I wouldn't have found them either. It's great that he has a colony but them being in a fishroom in Ontario is a far cry from being well represented in Canada. A lot of people all over North America had them at one point, but they're a plain little fish and people dropped their populations. We need as many people maintaining them as possible.

An entire country working towards the preservation of any species can't help but have a profound impact not just in numbers, but also awareness. It allows us to educate and inspire hobbyists and children, creating awareness about the fragility of not just one species of fish, but all wildlife. It's not about counting coup or saying someone is the only one with something rare or they're a better fishkeeper - it's the exact opposite. I don't know why anyone who is concerned at all about endangered species wouldn't be excited about seeing this happen, but then I thankfully don't share the same self-absorbed thought processes of some people.

But back to the important part, I am so glad to hear that they're being established in their native habitat again. Is the area protected more now?

[susankat]

From what I have heard that it is protected now, but what most people don't realize is that the pond that they were originally found in was very small. A couple of years ago the numbers in that pond had dwindled down to just a few 100. It is to my understanding that the pond has been clean up and made bigger, and is one of the places that you can't collect fish out of anymore.

[Melody]

That's amazing progress considering the area we're talking about. It has been a long, hard battle to get a message across there but it's starting to sink in. It would be awesome to get photos or footage of them releasing natives back into the water. I think that would be very inspirational. It would be an effective way to get club members involved and great for schools too.

Thanks for the info. If you happen to hear updates about this or any other preservation project, we'd love to hear about it.

[susankat]

I usually get my updates from Gerald Griffen or Ivan from the mexican site. Yes we have great club members. Gerald, Earl, Sue Katz, and a few others. Its nice to be local with these great minds.

[Melody]

From what we know of you so far, it sounds like they're lucky to be in your company as well. Not every fishkeeper would dedicate tank space to hundreds of little brown fish you know...lol.

Ivan Dibble? Now there's a dedicated man :notworthy: . It just goes to show what someone who truly cares can accomplish. To say he's an inspiration is an understatement. We may not be able to take it that far, but we most definitly can have an impact if our heart is in it.

[susankat]

Thanks for that compliment, but I feel I'm not worthy of that. Its just the company I keep and my enthusiasm I have for my fish. Most of my tanks are species tanks. Out of 18 only 3 has a few other things added to them. Like angels and bolivian rams. Even most of my cories are in species tank.

[Melody]

Anyone who does this for the love of fish, more than earns recognition for it. It's that heartfelt passion for the creatures in our care that makes a truly great fishkeeper. It naturally leads to a desire to learn more about them and to care for them as best we can.

When ego, status and/or extreme competitiveness becomes a part of that or obliviates it entirely, the fish become an instrument. While those people may think they're a superior hobbyist, they'll never reach the level that people like you and those in your club have and will. The higher purpose of preservation is something they will never understand, let alone embrace, and that is truly their loss.

Your experience with this species is invaluable and we greatly appreciate your sharing what you've learned. :Smile:

[Melody]

I would like to keep this information together, hence digging up the old thread.

Does anyone know which population we're dealing with, or if it's all the same one? There are two populations, Mr. Langhammer tells me, one rarely seen and the other more common in the hobby. The Apodaca population is still in the wild, so I assume that's the one in the enlarged pond. The Huasteca Canyon population only exists in captivity and it's the more commonly kept population. Both need help, is why I ask.

Maybe if everyone posts pictures of theirs, we can figure it out.

I don't think I ever correspond with that man without learning something. ::D:

[GaryofMontreal]

I don't know which I have. Every killie keeper hates receiving an unlabeled fish, but it seems the norm with livebearers.

[Melody]

Pedigreed fish are becoming the norm. In Canada we didn't have enough to worry about until recently..lol. Very few fish in the big picture come with a population ID'ed. I never see it with Tetras, for one, even those that are wild caught.