The Skeptical Aquarist

Since I'm confining myself to fishes I have some personal experience with, I can only offer you a disappointingly narrow range of cichlids. To placate you, let me begin with some major Cichlid links, since there are more Cichlid-oriented sites than for any other fish family:

Cichlid links. First of all, the central hub for Web information on cichlids is the Cichlid Research Home Page: www.cichlidresearch.com. This is Ron Coleman's utterly professional introduction to cichlids and keeping them in the aquarium, identifying them and breeding them. There is a wealth of advanced information too on cichlid phylogeny, cichlids in their natural surroundings, and the scientific literature. Note Ron's good advice on being cautious about what you hear on the web. The links from this site will get you everywhere, even to non-cichlid aquarium sites.

The American Cichlid Association publishes the bi-monthly Buntbarsche Bulletin, which is indexed and has a downloadable on-line archive (for members only— could be a sufficient reason to join) at www.cichlid.org.

Of course the combination of mailing-list archives and purpose-written articles at www.thekrib.com reflects Erik Olsen's own interest in dwarf cichlids. Now archived at thekrib.com: the Apistogramma mailing-list from Aug 1996 to now. If you're serious about the dwarves you might want to join.

I shouldn't omit a link to The Cichlid Room Companion, www.cichlidae.com, maintained by Juan Miguel Artigas Azas. An essential central cichlid site and hub of links, with articles by pros like Ron Coleman and Ad Konings.

Eric Gracyalny's pioneering Cichlid HomePage (CHOP), which he maintained from 1994 to 1998 is deep-frozen and archived at web.archive.org. You'll find a searchable database for cichlids, by scientific or by common name, with information you might not find elsewhere, though downloading is glacial.

And there's an outstanding book: George W. Barlow, The Cichlid Fishes: Nature's Grand Experiment in Evolution (Cambridge MA, 2000). This is written for the curious layman rather than for the cichlid hobbyist, who is already well served in specialized Cichlid books from the aquarium point-of-view. Barlow is a biologist and teacher who has inspired a generation of ichthyologists at Berkeley. He discusses cichlid jaws and sex and mating strategies and explosive speciation in the African lakes. It's great stuff, and it will bring you right up to date on issues that apply to many fishes besides cichlids.

Though Cichlid fossils peter out before the Cretaceous, leaving researchers with a handful of detached spines and ear stones (otoliths), the basic familiar Cichlid type had become established in the supercontinent of Gondwana by about 150 million years ago. How would one know that? Modern distribution of Cichlids provides the clues. First India (which has a few Cichlids of the genus Etroplus) and Madagascar (which also has some unique and conservative Cichlids), along with the Mascarene Platform (a slowly sinking continental fragment that carries the Seychelles Islands on it) rifted off Africa. About 84 million years ago further rifting tore India and the Seychelles from Madagascar and began their drift north, carrying the Indian Cichlids. PBS' "Nova" did a program on the Seychelles, and a webpage with a relevant article "Seychelles Through Time" has a cool animation of the breakup of Gondwana that would make Old World Cichlid distributions clearer: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/eden/time.html

Apistogramma and other South American dwarf cichlids. The Apistogramma Study Group guides captive breeding programs and publishes conservation studies, academic research, breeding information etc. etc in the definitive Apisto newsletter, well-titled The Apisto-gram. The organization is dedicated to advanced hobbyists and ichthyologists worldwide. Its members are your best sources for trading out-of-the-ordinary Apistos you won't find at the LFS. The Study Group reaches beyond Apistos to all dwarf (less than 4 inches) Neotropical and West African cichlids. At their website http://apisto.com click on "Phylogeny" at the main page to see Mike Wise's recent revision of his much-reprinted 1990 article on the genetic relatedness of the Apistogramma species-groups.

Sven Kullander's authoritative page on South American cichlids: www.nrm.se/ve/pisces/acara/welcome.shtml The best science from the master, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

"The World of Apistogrammas" Frode Roe's handsome, plentifully illustrated tour, with expanded descriptions of species: www.ntnu.no/~foksen/Apistogramma/apistogramma.htm

"Cichlid Power" Alf Stalsberg's vivid and authoritative page, featuring Lætacara and Æquidens spp: http://home.online.no/~stalsber/

David Soares' home page of Apistogramma and other dwarves: www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/7918 Several articles on setups, maintainance, breeding, and identifying Apistos within their species complexes. And Apistos for sale.

Acuario Nanay homepage, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jsmelgar/jota.html Julio Melgar, a well-known importer of South American cichlids and other fishes, has many photos of Apistogramma species.

Don Zilliox "Z-Man" http://members.aol.com/WnyZman This guy's one of the front-rank Apistogramma pros! Excellent first-hand articles on breeding and more. Good links too.

Other Cichlids.

The Cichlid Scene: www.cichlidscene.com The big Central American cichlids in unsurpassed condition, kept the way they need to be housed-- in mammoth tanks. Good cichlid stories, resources, well-chosen web links, excellent pix.

Vinod (Vinny) Kutty's website is "Mostly Cichlids" especially the pike cichlids, Crenicichla. He collects them, breeds them and makes outstanding photographs. He also writes about them with wit and style.

www.ohiexchange.com/armke The Armkes, in New Braunfels TX, especially import Tanganyika cichlids and other Lake Tanganyika fishes. Here are the shell-dwellers.

Cichlids I have experience with.

Apistogramma agassizi. The original Apisto, the first one that was on the U.S. market, now comes in several snazzy "selected" versions, of which I'm keeping the "Red Agassizi." This species has the widest distribution of any Apistos, with the result that color variants arise naturally in isolated populations. Though many of these variations will naturally arise among batches of tank-bred fry, it's interesting that wild females, when they are experimentally given the choice, will choose the male closest to their own regional morph, which supports suggestions that speciation is partly driven by females' sexual choices.

Though 5- and 10-gallon tanks are often recommended for breeding Apistos, you may be creating unnecessary difficulties if you're giving your breeders less space than 15 gallons, or if your planting isn't dense enough, or if you aren't offering enough alternative cavelike spaces. Though some gentle target fish can help reinforce the pair-bond, bottom-dwelling catfish can be disruptive or worse. Otocinclus may be better tankmates than even the mildest Corydoras. A little nightlight in the fishroom may be reassuring to a female guarding her wrigglers. Or it may give her just enough light to eat them by!

Rather than the ideal conditions of endless summery heat and the softest possible peaty water and pH below 6.0, a change in water conditions may provide the better spawning cue. Try letting the carbonate buffering build up, perhaps with some crushed coral in the filtration, over a period of weeks, then do a 75% water change using R/O water spiked with some peatwater.

Links. Some Apistophile postings about A. agassizi, including Oleg Kiselev's advice about breeding these touchy Apistos, are archived at the Krib. Some posts about the "Rio Tefé" population of this wide-ranging species are also archived at the Krib.

Apistogramma cacatuoides ("Cockatoo Apisto"). This tongue-twister name is "KACK-uh-two-OI-dees," as colorful "as a cockatoo" because of the male's crested forelock of a few extra long dorsal fin spines. As females mature, they develop a modest version of the crest.

There are currently 52 scientifically-described species of Apistogramma, plus about another 90 in hobby-oriented literature, according to guru Mike Wise. Now there are maybe a dozen Apistos that might turn up at a big LFS, though not all at one time. Apparently we're catching this genus right in the process of speciating. There are thirteen species-groups with closely-shared characteristics, one of which is the A. cacatuoides species complex, which includes A. luelingi and A. juruensis, neither of which is likely to turn up frequently at your LFS. This group is characterized by robust but slightly elongate bodies, the large fleshy lips of mature males (my cockatoos have sky-blue lips) and their variable flank streaks, the extended anterior dorsal fin spines I mentioned, and caudal fins that are produced at top and bottom into points, in a shape termed "lyrate." The males are polygamous harem-keepers. Sometimes females in yellow-and-black brooding dress blur their lateral band and develop a side spot, which comes and goes.

Apistogramma cacatuoides has many varying color morphs, which have been stabilized by selective breeding. My original patriarchal male was a "Triple Red," so-called because the red and black markings of his dorsal and caudal fins extend to his anal fin. As he matured his blue lips became fleshier. His bulldog lower jaw is white, with blue suborbital streaks and a blue chinstrap. His sons carry on his features. Randy Carey thinks we've all gone overboard in admiring this domesticated "Triple Red" feature, to the exclusion of the subtlety of wild types.

The Apistogramma pros rate A. cacatuoides as one of the good "starter" Apistos, because of its tolerance for pH ranges even slightly above pH 7.0, because of the docility of the males with one another and the general readiness of these fishes to breed. Other "starter" Apistos often mentioned, you'll be interested to know, are A. steindachneri, A. macmasteri, and A. "Schwartzsaum."

The type locality quoted when A. cacatuoides was first scientifically described in 1951 was given as near Paramaibo in Suriname, which in reality was nothing more than a trans-shipping point. The original collector was described as a sailor. At the time the genuine habitat must have been considered a "trade secret," for this widely-distributed species naturally occurs in clearwater or whitewater small tributary streams of the upper Amazon in the neighborhood of Iquitos and of the Rio Ucayali in eastern Peru and Rio Jurua in westernmost Brazil, all on the upper edges of the Amazon basin. David Soares says that Uwe Romer found A. cacatuoides in incredible densities of up to 100 in nine square meters, in leaf litter as much as a meter thick. Soares has kept up to 135 A. juruensis in a 20gal. tank, 700 A. cacatuoides in a 150gal. tank. Truly, cichlids for apartments, eh! Apistos do like some tropical warmth. Temperatures below 78°F will depress them and blunt their appetites. But you can keep them for weeks in summer at 86°F.

The wide natural distribution of Apistogamma species in small watercourses, has encouraged speciation. The native watercourses are isolated from one another by impassably large rivers, which encourages variation in small populations that don't have a chance to interbreed. When James Russel Wallace was exploring the Amazon in the 1840s, he was impressed with the broad rivers that isolated animal populations and encouraged the variation that led to new species. In Discover Magazine, April 1997, Virginia Morrell reported "On the Origin of (Amazonian) Species." She outlined work that Jim Patton of Berkeley is doing on Amazonian mammal distributions. The distribution of Amazonian mammals is surprisingly discontinuous, a pattern which reflects ancient ridges and shifted river patterns. Her article had interesting ramifications for freshwater fish species too, because these shifting discontinuities have sparked the amazing species radiation of Apistogramma and some Loricariid catfishes. You might want to see it, archived at the Discover.com archive.

I was reading recently about a genetic "failing," in which, as a male Apistogramma ages, his snout widens and curves into a "bulldog" nose that reminds you of the front of a VW bug. Other Cichlids develop a nuchal hump without being considered disfigured, and I think that, rather than a failing, this is a normal development, which only comes with full maturity, after a year or more. I've read that this "VW nose" isn't ever seen in the wild, but then all the Apistogramma males seen in the wild are never more than three-quarters grown. They just don't survive to the age they reach in our aquaria. In nature, males are more expendable than females anyway: the "harem" style of breeding insures that fewer males are needed to carry on the species. Females lurk safely in rolled-up leaves or husks or under roots, but the larger, gaudy territory-patrolling males are more vulnerable to predators. At any rate, I may be biased, for my "Cockatoo" males develop this feature in middle age. I have seen the "bulldog nose" noted for various other Apistogramma species, though not for cacatuoides. Apparently the genes for this feature are widespread through the genus. And that suggests that the mutation lies deep in time. When I first posted these reservations, at AquariaCentral, Marcus posted, February 29, 2000, "Actually, every older cacatuoides I have ever seen exhibits this "bulldog" look. I assumed it was just part af the maturation process. I wasn't aware that it was a defect. You are correct in saying that a long-lived fish in the wild is a rare occurrence."

My original female was at first a little on the small side. She was only half her male's length when they began spawning. Expect your young males to begin spawning at 4 to 5 months, before they're quite an inch and a half long, and when the female is just an inch overall! Apistogrammas will train you to feed them nothing but live food, by ignoring flakes unless they are seriously hungry. Wayne Liebel noted in an unsurpassed April 1994 Aquarium Fish article on keeping Apistos, "The most successful apistophile I ever met fed his fish live foods and changed at least ten percent of the water in his tank, every day! This was, perhaps, excessive, but the fish were gorgeous and he bred everything." Worms and sinking bloodworms are preferred; Apistos are reluctant even to go to the surface after mosquito larvae and fruit flies. Oleg Kiselev remarked in 1992. "...in the wild they spawn in huge leaves curled into tight tubes or in tennis-ball-sized nutshells... these fish like a lot of cover." So I give them roots and tennis-ball-sized coconut shells, and overhead cover with duckweed, water sprite and Pistia. The hanging "roots" of floating plants act like Java Moss to encourage a well-developed biofilm that supplements any food you can offer the fry. Microworms and newly-hatched brine shrimp nauplii are good early fry foods.

Apisto fry are almost invisible. They're a translucent golden tan with minute dark flecks, the scale and color of a grain of coarse silica sand. They hang motionless. Only when they dart are they visible, and in the cluster of fry, they seem to move individually only when all their closest neighbors are freezing.

It's not a good idea to mix various Apistogrammas species in the same tank. The females of the A. cacatuoides group are especially easy to confound. A. cacatuoides stand out from most Apistos by having three rather than four infraorbital pores. But details like this will not discourage Apistogramma species from interbreeding in the artificial confines of our aquaria.

Harem breeding. If they're given the chance, A. cacatuoides will form a harem, where one male patrols a territory that has been sub-divided by a group of females, and he spawns with each of them in turn.

I kept my first successfully-breeding cacatuoides pair in a 10 gallon tank, all by themselves, after a former male half-swallowed an Otocinclus in a fit of territorial defense, and both of them died in the event. I offered the pair many caves formed from small slabs of sandstone laid one on another at a slant and then mostly buried in fine gravel and coarse sand. More dark hideouts were provided by coconut shells.

Currently, in another 10-gal. tank with leaf litter and many hideouts, a single male successfully tends a harem of four sisters, who have never been separated. In these crowded conditions, however, I don't get to raise young.

A harem forms because the females cannot leave their eggs. I have thoughtlessly picked up a coconut shell that contained a clutch of eggs I was unaware of, and the female has risen up, following her clutch pasted to the domed interior. Once I drew out an occupied coconut shell with the courageous mother remaining inside even as the water drained away.

With the females dividing up the habitat into minute broodcare territories covering a few square inches, and immobilized there, it falls to the male to control as large a section of these nesting crevices and miniature caves and rolled leaves as he is able. That's why Apisto males have been naturally selected for larger size.

Where the male shares in parental responsibility, a pair bond must be formed. But harem females regularly exclude the male from brood care. With some A. cacatuoides pairs, the male will try to help herding the fry. With others, his "help" consists of sucking down the young. I noticed an inexperienced young A. cacatuoides male pick up fry in his mouth and transfer them, as his female was doing. She was on him in a flash, charging him furiously, backing him away from the brood and forcing him away to the edges of the territory by angry tailbeats.

It seems as though female-only brood care is a recently-evolved genetic pattern with this species, one that's still not firmly fixed.

Females in brilliant black and yellow breeding dress get a lot more respect from other females in my dense 10 gallon colony. A brooding mother enlarges her territory at the expense of her neighbors, and her neighbors tend to allow her more "elbow room." I'm sorry to relate that there is a lot of competitive fry-eating in my dense colony. Though the four females are sisters that have never been separated- and each share half their DNA, there is still some "DNA-jealousy." If there were some cooperation among the sisters, fry would survive.

Unbalanced sex ratios. Many people have noticed wide-ranging unbalanced sex ratios from spawnings, where almost all the fry will turn out to be male or female. Conflicting reports as to how pH and temperature affects these sex ratios have been settled recently. When Uwe Römer and W. Beisenhertz investigated connections between pH and sex ratios in 33 species of Apistos and two other South American dwarf cichlids, they found that, in general, the higher the pH, the greater the proportion of females in a brood, and the higher the temperature, the greater ratio of males. The most sensitive period in skewing the gender ratios was about 30 to 40 days after hatching. George Barlow reported this in The Cichlid Fishes, 2000, p. 57.

Very informative A. cacatuoides posts from the Apistogramma mailing-list are archived at www.thekrib.com/Apisto/A-cacatuoides.html

Kaycy Ruffer's experiences breeding A. cacatuoides are at her site www.kcff.net/newworld/apistogramma/cacatuoides/article.htm

Zack Wilson's good brief introduction to keeping A. cacatuoides is at www.aquamania.ws/articles/parrots.shtml

An article on keeping and breeding Apistos by Alan R. de Angelo, is archived at the Cichlid Room Companion, at www.cichlidae.com

Microgeophagus ("Papiliochromis") ramirezi (Ram). The particular Ramirez immortalized in our "Rams" is Manuel Vicente Ramirez; he and Hermann Blass from Florida collected the fish in 1947 in the llanos grasslands of Venezuela, on the left bank of the Orinoco. Blass imported some specimens and bred them, calling them "ramirezi," a name confirmed when they were scientifically described the following year. Very sporadically, wild-caught fishes from the south of Colombia used to be available, but I surmise that political turmoil in that contested region has eliminated that possibility. All the Rams you see in the U.S.A. market are tank-raised, either in Germany ("German" Rams are no more than that) or southeast Asia. Amelanistic mutations have produced "Golden" Rams, in which the normal admixture of melanin is suppressed, revealing the yellows that are usually olives and the pinks that are normally grays. And there are long-finned versions that might appeal to people who'd really prefer goldfish.

In spite of its origins in the llanos, aquarium lore has built up a picture of Rams as rainforest fishes.

The continual inbreeding for more intense color, which has resulted in a miraculously beautiful domesticated fish but one far removed from its wild origin, has taken a sad toll on its delicate constitution. Modern manufactured Rams seem to be smaller, too, than the fish I remember from years ago. When you set out to buy Rams you ought to be looking for sub-adult fishes if you hope to end up with a pair. "Virtually all the fully adult rams now marketed in North America are males," Paul Loiselle noted in the July 1994 issue of Aquarium Fish. "This state of affairs suggests that the breeders in the Far East are either shipping only males, or more likely, they are artificially creating unisexual broods by feeding the young food laced with methyl testosterone at some point in their development." This same disheartening strategy lies behind the sterilized all-male populations of "Sunset" Gouramis. If you're attending a local club fish auction, young tank-raised Rams are something to be on the lookout for. Another strategy is to buy a group of uncolored juveniles, less than an inch long. You aren't going to be able to distinguish a male's longer extensions of the first few dorsal spines, not in the young fishes you're buying, but you might look for the faintest hint of a healthy mature female's rosy magenta patch in her ventral region, and compare it to the male's more golden ventral area.

Mike Edwardes has an outstanding, well-illustrated detailed report in his journal style on the trials of breeding M. ramirezi at his site http://mike-edwardes.members.beeb.net He intentionally bred a Singapore male (they're all males) to a German female to get closer to a wild-type Ram, but his final conclusion is that many complaints about Rams' delicacy are due to environmental issues like water, temperature and age of the breeders, rather than genetics.

There are lots of posts concerning Rams archived at www.thekrib.com.

A long excellent article on keeping and breeding "German Blue" Rams is at http://hjem.get2net.dk/Best_of_the_Web/blue%20rams.html

Don Zilliox begins by letting a group of juveniles grow up together and form their own pairs. He's got some solid and very specific advice about breeding Rams at http://members.aol.com/WnyZman/rams.html

Take it for granted that the Rams you've just bought are harboring bacterial infections and possibly intestinal nematodes. Treatment for internal parasites should be a standard part of your quarantine procedure anyway. Joel, MN, reported experiments in 1998 with pH and Ram hatching rates, which were high at pH 5.5-6.0 but decreased to almost nil at pH 7.0, due to fungus. Fungus of eggs is often counteracted with methylene blue, but Joel's experience suggests that peat filtration might help raise the proportion of viable eggs.

Rams want warmth, about 80°, and for encouraging breeding, you can push the temperatures to 86 to 90 degrees. These steamy conditions will eliminate most gill parasites too. With extremely soft water and peat filtration producing tannin-laden acidic water, fungal spores and bacteria tend to be suppressed too. In these conditions, Rams will start to thrive, not just get by. At low pH, nitrifying bacteria are slowed or suppressed; you'll need dense healthy plant growth to scavenge ammonium.

Microgeophagus altispinosus (Bolivian Ram). (Though you see "altispinosa" everywhere, surely it ought to be "M. altispinosus," no?) M. altispinosus is a bigger, sturdier Microgeophagus, that gets to 4 inches (the female staying somewhat smaller). Fishes have red upper and lower margins to their tail fins, which are extended into filaments in the males. Otherwise they're a greenish gray with gold and black, less colorful than the domesticated Rams, it's true, but healthier, for the time being, and less inbred.

This fish is found in Bolivia, in the Rio Mamore near the town of Trinidad, in the basin of the Rio Guapore down to its mouth, in the Rio Quizer near San Ramon, at the mouth of the Igarape, and near Guajara-Mirim on the Brazilian border, according to H. Richter, 1989. This fish was discovered as long ago as 1911, but it wasn't represented in aquaria until Horst Linke and Wolfgang Staeck found a few in 1985 and got them safely back to Germany. These fishes are uncommon in their native haunts; the ones you'll see at the LFS are bred in Singapore from stock that originally came from Germany. De-worm them when you get them into your quarantine.

It's worth repeating the water parameters Linke and Staeck reported where they found their fishes: pH of 7.6, KH about 4 degrees, with a conductivity of 123 microSiemens. Noonday water temperatures hit the equivalent of 81°F. In other words, if you have trouble getting your water acidic enough to successfully spawn M. ramirezi, you might have better times with M. altispinosus. Give these fishes shade, perhaps with some floating plants, and plenty of cover. If they seem shy, it's a sign that light is too strong and perhaps the tank is too bare and open.

You'll want to scan the posts concerning Bolivian Rams archived at thekrib.com.

A good account by Lee Newman of "Keeping and breeding the Bolivian Ram, Microgeophagus altispinosa," from the Buntbarsche Bulletin, ACA 1996, pp 1-6, is posted at www.cichlidae.com. All the elements of breeding them are described: the four or five days of courtship, the site preparation, the look of the ovipostors, the pale gray fertile eggs contrasted with the white infertile ones, the free-swimming fry after 4 to 5 days.

A further good Microgeophagus link, with a bibliography and links to Lee Newman's articles from the Buntbarsche Bulletin, 168, pp 1-6, is at the same site www.cichlidae.com.

Ron Belliveau reported emergency mouthbrooding behavior in M. altispinosa; when he had to disrupt a breeding pair, removing some pieces of bogroot and netting out one then the other, he found fry in the new tank that could only have been transferred there in the mouth of one parent or the other. www.biodiversity.uno.edu/~cichlid/0097.html

Pterophyllum scalare (Angelfish). I haven't kept Angels since before the "plague" that swept through the tropical fish market starting in 1986. I tend to scorn the weirder mutant forms of Pt. scalare. The angels I long to keep are the wild green Pt. altum, those "tall" ("altum") Angels with the greenish cast and warm brownish black stripes and elegant natural finnage. They come from blackwater and clear tributaries of the upper Rio Negro and the Orinoco, in southern Venezuela and Colombia. They can get to be unexpectedly large, maybe a foot tall, and they're fierce, like real cichlids. ...and delicate and demanding, riddled with their natural intestinal parasites and scarcely ever spawned... everything you could ask for in a Cichlid (sigh).

Angelfish links: AngelBook is a good WebSite devoted to Angels. Two good articles on breeding Angels, one posted by Barbie at Fishaholics, the other Cindy Hawley's article archived at FINS.

James Kaufman and his daughter Annie take incredible microphotos of developing Angelfish fry. And he shows you how he goes about it, at his website.

Richard Thompson discussed Altum angels in Aquarium Fish, Nov/Dec 1989. Though I can't link to the fishnet archive, he contributed a more recent article on Altums to www.e-aquaria

And Wayne Leibel discussed the aquarium history, care and breeding of the three genera of wild "natural" Angelfish in one of his "Going South" Cichlid articles from Aquarium Fish, in the reference library at the Aquarium Fish website.

Angelish forums. There are some forums devoted to Angelfish. At www.angelfish.net Mike Wiegand hosts a forum with a board devoted solely to Pt. altum and other wild Pterophyllum strains!

Uaru amphiacanthoides (Uaru). I kept about six of these in a densely-planted 30g. tank for several years in the 1980s. They aren't often seen, because they aren't easily bred (though they were easy enough to keep in good health in my soft water) and they lack drama. No one has specialized in Uaru, I imagine. Uaru are voracious greens eaters. They will decimate any plant in their aquarium. They need constant veggies.

This Uaru is one of two species. Neither is often exported. There's little call for them at our end, and they are a common food fish all over their wide range in the Amazon and its tributaries: Rios Madeira, Xingu, Negro, Blanco, Tocantins and Cupari.

Wayne Leibel's article on Uaru, from his series "Goin' South" in Aquarium Fish, is the only good extended discussion I know; it's in the reference library at the Aquarium Fish website.

Jim Stigliano wrote a brief informative report on Uaru for the Greater Chicago Cichlid Association website where Uaru was cichlid-of-the-month Feb 2000. There's a fine portrait of a breeding pair with their mottled month-old fry.

Cynthia Teague and Dean Hougen of the South American Cichlid Study Group offer a chattier and more detailed account of pair formation among six Uaru that led to spawnings in a 125-gal tank that they shared with some geophagine cichlids and the fry-snatching little pike cichlid Crenicara compressiceps at the SACSG website hosted by Petsforum.

Dean Hougen included three species of Uaru in a brief report on the taxonomy of the Acara-like group of cichlids, in the May/June 1994 issue of Minnesota Aquarium Society's Aquazine.

More Uaru gossip and an unexpected spawning are in Brad Swanson's article, "P is for persistence" also in M.A.S. Aquazine, Jan/Feb 2000.

There were feature articles on Uaru in Aquarium Fish, June 1992 pp. 5-6 and in December 1992 pp. 60-63

Cichlids that are next on my list. Indulge me, please.

Lamprologus meleagris. A shell-dwelling dwarf from Lake Tanganyika, unusually small and unusually colorfully patterned, at least by Lamprologus standards. They are a bit bolder, I understand, than the shy N. brevis. The graveyards of Neuthauma snails form home turf for communities of shell-dwellers, but mine are going to be living in the shells I can get from a gourmet deli, meant for serving escargots.

There is an article on these famous shell-dwellers by Peter A. Lewis, "Shell-Dwelling Cichlids of Lake Tanganyika," reprinted from the Buntbarsche Bulletin. More Lamprologus articles are at thekrib.com. And Matt Pederson of The Cichlid Factory, Chicago, has a dependable and well-written introduction "Desktop Cichlids: Shell-Dweller recipe."

Pterophyllum altum. ...as I said.