Summer at SFAS

SFAS has seen some awesome talks this summer and I really can’t do them justice in this short blog format.

In June Andreas Schmidt, the President of San Francisco Bay Brand, came and spoke about the history of SFBB and culturing brine shrimp. His experiences from helping his parents run a local fish store to farming brine shrimp on a massive scale throughout the US and China was impressive. I learned a lot about the life cycle of brine shrimp and why baby brine are so important in the aquarium hobby. He brought in a bunch of SFBB swag for members to grab, including free food samples! You can find out more about the company at www.sfbb.com, or pick up some of their great foods at your LFS. In fact, I just picked some up from Hung Ming Aquarium in Daly City and my fish love their frozen Brine Shrimp.

In July Dean Tweeddale spoke about his travels to Iquitos, Peru and collecting aquarium fish on the Amazon river. It sounded like such a unique vacation. Dean got to live on a river boat for about a week and travel around catching catfish and lungfish. Who wouldn’t want to go hiking through the jungle seeing wild angelfish, discus, and corydoras? By the way those wild spotted discus were amazing. There’s something about an active vacation like he described that sounds appealing to me. The flight there doesn’t sound fun (nor the immunizations) but seeing the culture and lifestyles of Peruvians must’ve been amazing. His discussion about the food is what really caught my attention, maybe I just like to eat but I’d definitely try pleco and guinea pig. Check out MT Amazon or Go Wild Peru to find out more about visiting Peru to collect fish. If you want to hear more from Dean about his trip or fish room, check out some of the videos on Aquarium Co-Op. Both Dean and Cory from Aquarium Co-Op are traveling to Peru again this summer to collect so keep an eye out on for videos about their trip.

Last week, Randy Carey spoke about his experiences spawning and raising the scatterers (danios, barbs, and tetras). There’s definitely a different approach to breeding them compared to other fish such as livebearers, cichlids, or catfish. Considering the parents show very little protection for the young, you have to become the parental caretaker of such tiny fish. What a challenge it must be to care for 3000 penguin tetra fry! His presentation made me want to set up a small tank to give it a shot. Maybe I’ll try something a little easier that spawns a couple less eggs. It was really interesting, I’ve seen a number of videos where folks use marbles but he didn’t seem to be partial to them. Either way, if you have a chance to see Randy speak at your club I highly recommend you attend as you will learn a ton about breeding these common aquarium fish.

Obviously, there have been some nice summer days and it seems a lot of members are out enjoying the nice weather. As a result, there has been some great prices for fish and plants at the auction. There were some steals to be found at the auction June and July!

sterbai cory x4, $7

5 gallon fish tank, $3

Super red bushynose pleco x3, $15

Veil-tail albino bristlenose pleco x2, $18

Daphnia cutlure, $6

Anubias nana petite, $3

Least killifish x6, $1

Java moss, $2

Fancy guppies x10, $1

Julii cory x 4, $10

Acrylic ‘bubble’ tank, $40

~40 gallon column tank, $80

Next month we have UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. candidate Joe Cutler speaking about the magnificent mormyrids. See you next month!

Jeff Jackson, SFAS Webmaster

P.S. The East Bay Regional Park District is hosting the 3rd annual Crab Cove Fish Festival in Alameda Saturday August 31st. You can find out more at their info page.