You bring up a good point - one I have been thinking about for a while.
I looked on the nanfa website for info about P welaka and found a couple
of report of breeding them. I cannot find the reports at the moment,
but both were from some time ago. As I recall, the fish was being bred
so that it could be distributed to the hobby. Yet here it is, 10-15
years later and we're still having the same discussion.
Does this mean the fish will never be bred? who knows the future. if I
did, I'd buy a lottery ticket. I'm just sharing a thought that has been
rattling around my mostly empty head these last few days while the rest
of you have been making much more intelligent conversation about this
splendid fish.
Geoff Kimber
Lexington,KY
On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 15:08, Christopher Scharpf wrote:
> > How many people on this list are good at keeping Pink Muckets, Rough Pigtoes,
> > Cumberland Monkeyfaces or any of the other endangered Unionid mussels?
>
> For that matter, how many people on this list -- how many people in NANFA --
> are are able to breed the fish they keep and profess to love? Easy-to-breed
> species like Heterandria and Cyprinodon aside, I can count on one hand the
> amateur hobbyists in this country who can regularly and systematically breed
> minnows and darters, hatch the eggs, and raise the fry to adulthood.
> Breeding temperate stream fishes in aquaria isn't easy. Hobbyists talk up a
> storm about "saving" species, but very few are able or willing to do the
> work. I'm not knocking the recreational keeping of native fish because
> they're pretty, or fun, or interesting. I'm just saying that catching a fish
> from the wild and keeping it in a fish tank until it dies is a long way from
> so-called "conservation collecting."
>
> If one were to round up every last specimen of P. welaka from the wild and
> distribute them to hobbyists for "safekeeping," the species would be
> functionally extinct in about 2 years.
>
> Chris Scharpf
> Baltimore
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