Nanochromis sabinae

[ed seeley]

I've started this thread up from one i started in the general area. As a 'newbe' i thought it was better in here and i might get more West African experience here!


Ted Judy posted this in response to me asking if anyone's any experience of Nanochromis sabinae;

Try this link: http://www.apistogramma.com/cms/Nano...romis_sabinae/

I have some. They are nice fish. The paper that describes them states that the water they are from is very low in pH (4.0). Ihave dropped the pH to 5.5 and the female started shoing signs of spawning. The species gets a decent size for the type. My males are 2.5 inches and the females are close to 2". They are very orange in color and like live foods, though they also take flake.
__________________
Small is relative....

Ted Judy
www.tedsfishroom.com
Stoughton, WI

I replied,

Thanks Ted.
Seen that page thanks. Glad to hear you're having a good time so far with them. Looks like mine have a lot of growing to do, the bigger male's 1.5" and the smaller one's just over an inch! They're tucking into lots of frozen foods so hopefully they'll soon get up to size.
When the new girls arrive i'll start to look at feeding them up too, then dropping the pH (Thanks for that info).
How are you finding the agression? I lost one female in the tank from an injury, but assume it happened in transit as I have no agression yet apart from a little displaying between the two males. They sit together and eat black mosquito larvae then display a bit and go their seperate ways. What size tank are they in? How many have you got?
Thanks,
Ed.

If anyone else has any experience especially regarding keeping breeding and agression levels please let me know! The only nano i've kept before was N.transvestitus in a 2ft tank and inevitably the male killed the female - if only i knew their agressive side!

PS Ted i hope you don't mind me copying your response across to here!!!

 

[Simon Morgan]

Hi Ed,

I kept a few Nanos in the past, but never sabinae. I'd love to know where you got them.
Aggression wasn't a problem for me with transvestitus, the pair I had were quite stable (the pH wasn't!!) but the parilus I kept were always fighting.
I suggest starting with a group in a larger tank eg 4' with another pair of westies such as kribs, subs etc. The larger fish should provide a target for their aggression and stop them killing their other half!!
Good Luck!
Simon

 

[ed seeley]

Thanks for that info.
They're in a 36"x18"x18" tank and that's the largest i have at the moment!
Got them from TriMar in Cornwall, think Monty's still got some in - he's got two more females reserved for me as one died in transit and the other after putting her in the tank.
He's got some more great West Africans in too.
At the moment the two males are very peaceful (worringly peaceful - when will WW3 start?). Bit of displaying and that's all. Those four (when the girls arrive) will be joined by a pair of Apistgramma eremnopyge soon, and when the pairs stabilise i will move the spare two nanos to another three foot tank i keep in my class at school, once i move the pelvicachormis suboccelatus Matadi breeding in there now elsewhere!
PS, ordered from TriMar before and never lost any, sure this was a one off. Great service.

 

[retro_gk]

I've got a pair that has spawned twice. Not one of the harder to keep Nanochromis, IMO.

They're in a 20 long with some apisto pairs (also spawning) and danios for dithers. Water with a pH just above 5 and barely detectable hardness. Clutches of 30-40 eggs each time.

 

[ed seeley]

I've got a pair that has spawned twice. Not one of the harder to keep Nanochromis, IMO.

They're in a 20 long with some apisto pairs (also spawning) and danios for dithers. Water with a pH just above 5 and barely detectable hardness. Clutches of 30-40 eggs each time.

That's good to hear Rahul. Once the new females arrive i might be in business then! Or more accurately they might!

What about aggression, both amongst themselves and to other species? Had any problems?

 

[retro_gk]

No aggression out of the ordinary. I found N. parilus and N. transvestitus to be more aggressive. These guys are very easygoing, at least in my tank.

 

[ed seeley]

Thanks Rahul,
My males are starting to bicker a little bit, but, like you said, nothing severe!
Going to be adding a pair of Apistogramma eremnopyge and 12 Nannostomus eques on Friday so that'll give them something to keep them occupied i'm sure!
Thankls all for your advice and any more anyone else had is much appreciated!

 

[retro_gk]

I can't think of anything else. They appreciate leaf litter and a dimly lit tank. Feed a variety of foods. Mine get shrimp mix, live black worms, frozen bloodworm, bbs, grindal worms and some flake. 10% water changes every 3 days.

 

[tjudy]

Mine spawned today (or yesterday late). pH 5.8, KH 1, 120 mS conductivity, 76F. I feed daily bbs and veggie based flake foods. They get grindal or white worms twice a week.

 

[ed seeley]

Thanks both of you. Everything you've posted has been a great help. When all you've got to go on is Linke and Staeck's and Lamboj's books, it's great to hear from others keeping and breeding them successfully!

Hope your spawn goes well Ted and the parents will keep a good watch over them!

Have some American (Red) Oak (Quercus rubra) leaves collected this autumn so once the tank has settled a bit more i may well try them as a substrate. They look great in the tank i've already got them in.

My two males are starting to fill out a bit now that they're stuffing themselves with a wide range of frozen food.

Cheers

 

[retro_gk]

Good going, Ted. Did you leave the eggs with the parents?

 

[tjudy]

Yes... the eggs hatched this morning or last night, and there is a pile of wigglers on the bottom of the spawning cave.

 

[retro_gk]

That's pretty quick. It took mine 48 hours to wrigglers and a further 5 days to free swimming.

 

[ed seeley]

Glad things are going well so far.
My two are slightly overwhelmed at the moment, the Apistogramma eremnopyge that i have just recieved have them totally dwarfed! They're like little Lilliputians in comparison! I'm hoping this will give them a distraction for when the new girls arrive! It certainly seems to be keeping them busy now, lots of displaying, not much real aggression - perfect!

Do you guys know which population of N.sabinae you have? From what i understand the fish described as N.sp.'Makoua', N.sp.'Genema' and, I think, N.sp.'Green Speckle' are all now officially described as N.sabinae. As you can see in Lamboj's book they are very similar, but distinct. Shouldn't we (and especially sellers / Wholesalers) be differentiating these populations, like killifish keepers do? Would be a shame if rather than the actual wild populations we had a kind of aquarium mish-mash.

I must admit here I don't know which exact population I have so I'm not trying to be in any way critical, just wondered if you had the extra info.?
Looking at the photos my fish seem closest to the N.sp.'Makoua' photos, which, I believe, was the population the holotype was taken from. Of course they aren't fully grown yet so i wouldn't hang that label on the with any certainty. Going to do some more digging from the guy i got them from and see if he has any idea.

 

[tjudy]

I got mine from Toyin Ojo, who actually listed the fish as N. cf. sabinae "Tschuapa" becasue we was unsure exactly what they were. The Tschuapa is apparently a geographical reference in the CAR. I have a copy of Lamboj's description paper for N. sabinae, in color (on my computer actually). I am convinced the species I have is N. sabinae.

Fish exports out of the CAR, or so I have been told, are infrequent but large. Collectors actually export the fish through Cameroon, literally trucking the fish across the border. I suspect that all the N. sabinae that ended up with Oliver Lucanus, Tony Orso and Toyin Ojo a couple months ago all came from the same place (if not the same Cameroon exporter). I base that assumption on the fish all being imported within a month, they look identical (I have seen the fish from Toyin and Oliver, and been told that Tony's look the same) and the price (which is about $25/pr wholesale from all three importers). Using the same logic I would suspect exports to the UK during the same time period to also be from that batch of fish exported from the CAR.

As far as keeping geographic races separate from each other... yes, I think that we should be keeping them separate. However, if you have two geographic forms of N. sabinae, but not pairs of either (males of one, females of the other) I do not see a problem pairing them and calling the offspring a 'tank strain'.

 

[ed seeley]

Wow that's great detailed info! Got to e-mail the supplier i got mine from in a bit about something else, so i'll cheekily ask him if he has any more info on them!

Understand where you're coming from about mixing populations if it's the only option or we lose them, but i disagree in principle. What if they later classify the two populations as seperate species? Reproductive isolation is possibly THE key idea in the biological species concept of what a species is.
The problem is we do mix populations all the time (and most of the time it really doesn't matter because they may occasionally mix in nature) because we don't have the kind of information that, for example, killifish keepers use with collection codes. I just think it's a shame we don't have an analogous system for other wild fish. With the information on the web, such as google earth, a collection code with a location reference would tell you exactly where they came from. Of course some collectors might mis-use this, or not publish them so that no-one else can go there and catch the same population, but hey nothing's perfect!

I'm pretty sure we actually agree on this in essence, just my old training in population genetics makes me a bit more picky i suppose!!!!

Hope the wrigglers are still wriggling (or even swimming!); my two males are currently rather cowered by the (huge!) new pair of Apistogramma eremnopyge, but there's plenty of hiding places in my tank so after a quick chase everything settles right down!

 

[tjudy]

If two populations can intermingle naturally then they are not, technically, separate populations. I can go on and on about the whole P. taeniatus Keinke/Dehane/Lokounje/Makoure/Bipindi forms which share a drainage. We also have an issue with different people collecting the same locations and using different names. When scientists/hobbyists do it the problem usually lies in inclomplete research about who has collected where. When commercial collectors do it they are usually looking for a competitive advantage. For example, there have been some P. taeniatus from Moliwe recently being sold as P. t. 'Spotty'. Are they truly a distinct population from 'Moliwe', or are the collectors artificially selecting the spottier fish out of the overall population?

The killifish system is not based upon commercial collections of fish. Killie keepers are probably the best travelled aquarists in the world. They take great pains to know exactly where the fish come from, and they will not take a commercial collector's word for it. I had some wild collected P. annulatus a while back that I bought from Toyin. The killie enthusiasts actually quite rude about my offering wild and F1 fish without the collection locality number.

What we REALLY need is for groups of travelling aquarists with diverse interests to go collecting together. I visited with a killifish collector recently who went to Cameroon last year. All they kept were killifish. He made a point of telling me that there were many cichlids in the nets, but the native children helping them would put the cichlids in their pocket to take home for food. Even if the collectors are not keeping the fish they could at least attempt to document what they found. Even genus-only information would be useful, so that future collectors would know that there are fish of a specific genus in the area.

 

[ed seeley]

Totally agree Ted! Would love to go collecting, but I don't know as i can persuade my head teacher to let me go to Africa for a fish collecting trip though! And i'd want to bring EVERYTHING back! (Except maybe for a crocodile or two and mosquitoes!)

There would be huge problems with that kind of system operating for cichlids, i agree, just saying it would be great if it did!

The point i was trying to make was, i think, the same as the one you made really - that we just don't know if they ARE separate populations or not and shouldn't we err on the side of caution and assume they are until we know otherwise? You can't undo a possible hybridisation once the fry are distributed, which is hopefully what will happen when we breed these fish!

If we did know that they were ends (or points) of a continuous distribution range, as it seems in some of the species of angelfish or, to quote a textbook reference, the ring species of Lesser Black-backed gulls and Herring gulls around the UK, then that is another issue. However, as the gulls prove, they can be different species even though they share genetic material, as long as the flow of genetic material between the populations is slow enough. For small, mainly sedentary fish this could (I'm not saying it does, just could) happen along a river's drainage system.

Guess i'm just a rather conservative with this kind of thing and would like to see the populations of fish we keep kept distinct from their sister populations. I also agree that it's not something to get too hung up on and there's definitely no need to be arsey about it like some killi enthusiats can be! I suppose if we had an analogous system though and people didn't use it it would be a waste though...

 

[ed seeley]

Update on progress

My two replacement females have finally arrived to go with the two males in my 40g (180l) tank. :biggrin:

Immediately after aclimatising them and releasing them into the tank, I had to go out (Typical!) and had fingers crossed all night that they were ok.

I needn't have worried. When I got back the next day the females were fine, but being hassled a bit by the dominant male, who has grown into a splendid specimen, far larger than the sub-dominant (beta) male.

There isn't too much aggression between the two males actually. The b male usually stayed out of the aplha's way and when they met, after a quick chase, they went their own ways. The females, new to the tank and settling in, however weren't too good at this so, for their safety I removed the male to what is normally my quarantine tank (currently rearing 30+ Cardinal tetra babies and Ancistrus fry).

He is going to spend the next week to a fortnight in there while the other three settle down. Once they are sorted I will re-introduce the alpha male one day when I'm around and wait and see what happens!

One female has a nicely rounded belly already (but not at the swallowed a gold ball, ready to burst with eggs, stage yet) and they are all going to get a good feeding of various frozen foods as they settle down. My aim is to let the dominant pair stay in the 40g, while the other pair will go into a 3ft tank in my class at school.

I'm going to try take some pictures later, but as i only have a compact digital camera, don't expect great things!

 

[ed seeley]

I reintroduced the dominant male today and he and the dominant female have paired up after a bit of chasing and displaying! :biggrin:

The other female was getting a rather rough deal so she's now taking a break in the quarantine tank. She will be introduced to a 3ft tank in my class at school and, when she's settled, the subdominant male will be introduced too.

As I type this they're checking out all the caves! Will try to get some better pictures later.