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Fishmonger Newsletter

Hairy Puffers, Corydoras, & Construction Updates

October 2021

Fish Store Construction Progress

The concrete foundation has been poured, curb and gutter has been laid, and backfill/grading around the foundation has been completed. Most of the framing for the walls has been assembled and raised. Also, we are now ready to pave the entrance/parking spaces. After that, we will begin construction on our surface well where we collect the creek water which feeds our aquariums’ flow-through system!

Construction Update Video

Join Dan for a brief tour the construction progress we’ve made on our new fish store since last month.

This first pic shows the backfilled building pad after the under-slab plumbing was completed.

The pad was then recompacted.

Drain pipes getting trimmed and rebar going down.

Freshly poured concrete foundation.

Combating the deep Wyoming frostline with a thick layer of insulation on and around the foundation.

Backfilling to the foundation before compacting and grading.

Door frames going up.

Walls getting famed out.

Its starting to look like a real building!!!

Featured Article

Keeping & (Almost!) Breeding Pao baileyi:

Adventures with My Hairy Puffer Colony

PREFACE: Puffer fish from the genus Pao have a reputation for being, uninteresting and murderous. They are often described as “potatoes” online because, like a potato, they are ugly, brown, and supposedly sit around on the bottom of the tank without moving. That’s the reputation.

I was drawn to Matthew Proctor’s article on Pao baileyi because it reports something quite different than the mainstream narrative. In Mr. Proctor’s experience, these fish are much more active and interactive than commonly believed and are much less bloodthirsty than commonly reputed. From personal experience, I know that fish can act quite differently when kept in different setups, and we cannot guarantee that your experience with them will be the same as those shared in this article. Even so, I think this article is a valuable counterpoint which reminds us that the experiences of individual aquarists can vary widely and that there are very few hard-and-fast rules when it comes to fishkeeping. Also, I just had to share the neat pictures Mr. Proctor has captured of these fish during spawning!

My thanks to you, Matt, for daring to share your experiences with all of us.

-Dan Hodnett

Article and all photos by Matthew Proctor

Due to my career path, I am lucky enough to live and keep fish on a beautiful Colorado mountain top at 9,100 feet. As a small child, I began keeping fish with my father and was encouraged by my parents to learn from the fish that I kept. I recall my first breeding project at the age of 12 was creating a strain of platies in my bedroom that involved mapping basic genetics and tracking lineage in a notebook. I stopped for a while, serving in the United States Army from 2002 to 2009 and subsequently beginning my government career.

Group of wild caught Pao baileyi exploring a 50 gallon aquarium.

Thanks to a great wife I got back into keeping aquarium fish in 2017 and have maintained a small fishroom since 2018. The first major project of the fishroom was involved Pao baileyi commonly referred to in the hobby as the Hairy Puffer. The Hairy Puffer is an amazing freshwater puffer species from the Mekong River basin and the larger flowing bodies of water that feed into that river. In nature, they are most commonly found in rocky, flowing habitats which can include river rapids. This species is quite common in the wild and they are prolific with an estimated population doubling time of less than 15 months (Roberts 1998). Population doubling time is an important metric which helps us understand a species' resilience and is one of the factors taken into consideration when authorities decide if an animal should be listed as vulnerable, endangered, or extinct (Froese, et al. 2016). This species’ is classified as “of least concern," meaning it has a healthy population in the wild.

They are called “hairy” for good reason! This male has a heavier beard than females.

2017 - The Origins of the Hairy Puffer Project

I purchased my first hairy puffer back in May of 2017. Unfortunately, it perished in February of 2018 with no warning and within an hour of noticing "off" behavior. I assume there was some sort of internal issue with that particular individual since no other fish were affected. In that brief time, I found my hairy puffer to be a very engaging fish and not at all like the stationary "potato" so often described on the internet. As a result of that experience, I decided that it would be a rewarding challenge to try breeding and raising my own hairy puffer fry, a challenge which I'm still working toward completing.

My current hairy puffer breeding project began with the purchase of three wild caught puffers. They were purchased from an online vendor and arrived at the fishroom in May of 2019. Initially, they were placed in a 40-gallon breeder tank with zebra danios for dither fish, live plants, and caves. They each chose a separate section of the tank to reside in and never fought with each other while establishing their territories. Eventually, they were moved to a 50 gallon aquarium. In mid-2021, a pair formed and began exhibiting spawning behavior.

The Hairy Puffers “beard” helps it blend in as it waits to ambush prey.

Setup Snapshot

Food: Frozen krill with Vita-Chem, frozen bloodworms with Vita-Chem, small schooling fish, mystery snails, larger ramshorn snails, and frozen clams on the half shell.

Temperature: 76°F

Nitrate: 20

Nitrite: 0

GH: 300

KH: 30

pH: 7.0

Lighting: 600mm 6-8am sunrise 7-8pm sunset.

Cover: Ceramic caves and pipes, driftwood, amazon frogbit, dragon stone.

Parents: Wild Caught Obtained May 1st 2019

Paired: June 2021

Spawning Behavior: ≈ 6” Female ≈ 4.5” Male regularly enter a 4” diameter open clay pipe displaying color changes, inflating and deflating, rubbing each other rhythmically. I describe this behavior as the puffer "breeding waggle."

Pair of Pao baileyi spawning in a clay pipe.

2021 - Hairy Puffer Spawning Behavior Begins

In May of 2021, the hairy puffer group broke into a clear pair with the largest puffer and smallest puffer staying on the half of the tank with clay pipes and the third puffer remaining on the other side of the tank which contained driftwood. The smallest puffer with the most beard took possession of the bottom left pipe and began displaying to the larger, smoother female. The female displayed back to the male in a similar fashion before entering the pipe, where they rubbed and waggled against each other. Both puffers' colors changed to a light blotchy pattern and they inflated/deflated while slowly waggling prior to and during spawning.

Female Hairy Puffer in breeding dress.

So, that's my Hairy Puffer adventure so far. I have yet to raise fry from the group, but I expect that milestone to occur anytime now based on the frequency and duration of the spawning behavior observed over the past months. In addition, I've recently gained more understanding of Pao breeding behavior when my Mekong River Puffers (Pao palustris) spawned in another tank and managed to produce a few fry. Based on observing both my species of Pao, I can safely say that Hairy Puffers are pair-forming cave spawners with the male tending to the spawn once eggs are produced. Hairy Puffer's seem to spawn regularly for a period and then cease spawning for a few months before beginning the cycle again. Because the pair bond ceased at the end of each spawning period, I believe they form a strong, albeit temporary pair bond for the purpose of reproducing. I've found them to be much more of a social species than is commonly thought.

Far from being “potatoes,” these puffers are more active than is commonly reported online.

Lessons Learned

The Hairy Puffers I have kept exhibit highly individualized behaviors. Each member of my group prefers certain food colors, certain live fish types and shapes, certain sizes and varieties of live snails, and certain areas of the tank depending on their moods. They will often hunt as a group if fish are being consumed with two setting ambush locations and one flushing the fish out towards the ambush. They will then rotate jobs so that everyone gets food. My experiences with this species, though not necessarily representative of all individuals of the Pao genus, is that they are not mindless fish killers. My group lets schools of livebearers, barbs, danios, etc. remain in the tank, preferring instead to feed on snails that are big enough to remove from the shell in one shot, or on frozen offerings. They seem reluctant to expend the extra energy required to hunt fish. I have kept a school of small fish in with these puffers for the duration of their lives to help clean up the mess puffers make while eating frozen foods. Recently, I caught eighteen tiger barbs out of the puffer tank in order to limit the risk to the puffers' spawn. Those barbs had been cohabitating with the puffers for four months prior to their removal. I have found that schools of smaller fish are generally ignored by the puffers after a few days or weeks when the school is aware of the puffers enough to avoid them. While it is true that the dither fish in the tank are possible puffer food, it seems that once the population of schooling fish stabilizes only the weaker, older, or less healthy fish are consumed by the puffers. They trim the herd rather than mindlessly murdering it.

References

Froese, Rainer, Nazli Demirel, Gianpaolo Coro, Kristin M Kleisner, and Henning Winker. 2016. "Estimating fisheries reference points from catch and resilience." Wiley Online Library. October 18. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12190.

Roberts, T.R. 1998. "Pao baileyi ." fishbase. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://www.fishbase.se/summary/Pao-baileyi.html.

A Cornucopia of Corydoras!

We are having a ton of fun getting to know several species of Corydoras that are new to us. If we had to pick a favorite, we just couldn’t!

Corydoras fulleri C115/C116

Corydoras carlae

Corydoras cruziensis C012

Corydoras sp. CW124 are the only Cory we’ve kept that ever shows aggression. They don’t do any real damage, but they tend to chase each other around so a larger tank is recommended.

Corydoras aurofrenatus (formerly C. ellisae)

Scleromystax barbatus is very closely related to Corydoras and grows to about 4”, making it a giant. Like C. sp. CW124, they need space as they can be aggressive with conspecifics.

Corydoras similis

Aspidoras raimundi are small, energetic cousins of the Corydoras.

The beautiful Corydoras adolfoi and Corydoras duplicareus are nearly impossible to tell apart. Ours came in as C. adolfoi, but you never know for sure. Thanks to Stan Sung his great pic of what is likely a true C. adolfoi from several years ago!

This Corydoras sterbai “Itenez” is descended from Bolivain fish collected by Dr. Joachim Knaak.