Badids

Badids, the "not-labyrinth" fishes. The few species of Badis and now Dario make up the family Badidae. They are related to the Nandids, the "leaffishes," and they are close cousins of the ancestor of all the labyrinth fishes. Probably their own ancestors were related to cichlid ancestors somewhere even earlier, before the close of the Jurassic. The Badids are Laurasian fishes from the northern supercontinent of the Mezozoic Era, whereas Cichlids got started in Gondwana, the southern supercontinent. Today the Badid family homeland ranges from the Ganges lowlands of India, eastwards to the mid-Mekong in Thailand, south into peninsular Thailand and north into mountainous upper Burma and southern China. You see what a strong range overlap there is with the Anabantoid families.
 
Badis ruber ("Badis badis burmanicus"). Badis ruber is recently re-established as a senior synonym for the more familiar designation of this fish as a sub-species, B. badis burmanicus. The "Burma Badis" occurs in southern Burma and the mid reaches of the Mekong, in slow-moving streams and weedy ditches.
 
Recognizably distinct from other Badis by the large dark blotch on the caudal peduncle, this little fish maxes out at 8cm/3 in.  In 2002 Sven Kullander and Ralf Britz  revised the family Badidae, with a new genus, Dario, for three small Badid species that are among the smallest Perch-like fishes known, and ten new Badis spp. There's an abstract of their article at the Swedish Museum of Natural History site. At the same site, B. ruber and other new Badis species from Burma are illustrated from museum specimens and briefly mentioned by C.J. Ferraris, S. Kullander and F. Fang.
My four were new to me as I first set these notes down in March 2003. I'd been told not to try them in a community, even quite a gentle one, because they'd be outcompeted for food. I'll be lucky if they deign to eat any flake feed at all, another source warned me, and sure enough, they haven't. I saw right away that they are little ambush predators. They lurk, threateningly immobile, challenging one another. I provided plenty of coconut-shell hideouts, because I heard they prefer a cave as the heart of their mini-territory, in a 10-gallon tank stuffed with young Java Fern, where the water circulation is mild. Temp 71-77°F. My water is very soft, lightly buffered with some crushed coral to keep it about pH6.8.
 
In early September, after many weeks of heat and tank temperatures into the low 80s, I lost one of the males, with internal bacterial infections that appeared as popeye and intestinal edema. Several web posters are suggesting that too much heat promotes such bacterial infections in Badis. My fishes had been raised almost exclusively on blackworms, too rich a diet I know, but they have never looked at any flake feed.
 
Don Kinyon had six juvenile Badis badis he located through the Internet; he set them up in a 40-gallon tank at about 74°F with bogwood, inverted flower pots, Java Fern and Java Moss, with some Croaking Gouramis and Corydoras for company. His Badis accepted frozen and freeze-dried foods, white worms, chopped earthworms and mosquito larvae. A male's breeding dress, black body with blue fins, first alerted him that there were fry under one of the flowerpots-- about a hundred of them. See his article "Badis badis", which was first published in the Potomac Valley Aq. Soc. journal, Delta Tale, vol 30, pp2-3.
 
Dave Sanchez, who started a Badis research group, badisbadis@yahoogroups.com, in Jan 2002, originally as a spinoff from the Apisto Study Group,  has had Badis ruber breeding in a community, taking up residences in PVC pipe. When the young have absorbed their yolksacs and are clearly showing their eyes, he's siphoned them out and raised them in plastic shoeboxes, like killies, with strands of Java Moss, a technique he calls a "very simple and very prolific way to get a whole lot of these guys real quick."
 
Frans Goddijn's Badis blog, some of the best descriptive material on the Internet, is at his site. 
 
Links. An article on Badis ruber is at Seriously Fish, and there's an illustrated species listing on Badis ruber, species profiles of Badis badis and Dario dario (Badis ruber) at Tropical Fishkeeping and another on Badis badis at the Aquaworld site.  
 
Alexander A. Priest, "Badis ruber, a small fish with a big attitude", archived at the Federated American Aquarium Societies site.
 
Badis ruber at FishBase.