This past Friday, I attended my local aquarium society meeting and broke one of my cardinal rules: Don’t buy any fish without first researching them!
I have a reason (some might call it an excuse). The fish were being offered for sale by a long-time member and no one was bidding. Usually when this happens, if someone starts the bidding, it will pick up from there. So I did and it didn’t.
Now I have a bag of three quite nice yellow cichlids that (as of Friday night) I knew nothing about except that they were from a very reputible source and they could be kept in an aquarium.
Unfortunately I was not able to talk to the seller after the auction for several reasons, but there is always the internet so that is what I did… I searched and found them. At least I think I did.
If I am right, they are Labidochromis caeruleus, a mouth brooder from Lake Malawi. I intend to confirm this when I talk to the seller this week.
I am not unhappy with this purchase as they are relatively small and very attractive fish. If I am right about my identification (and possibly if I am wrong) I am going to try to breed them so you will be hearing more about that in future posts.
The real point of this post is to say that I could have been in real trouble by buying the fish without knowing anything about them! They could have been tank busters or extremely aggressive or could have had special needs that I couldn’t meet.
It is just generally a bad idea to do this without checking the fish out first and making sure you can accommodate them in your aquarium. It worked out for me, but I could have ended up with a fish (or several) that I couldn’t keep and possibly couldn’t get rid of (after all, no one else bid on them). Enough said.
As a preview of more to come – I also bought some other fish at the auction – three other pairs to be exact: a pair of Black Moscow Guppies, a pair of Black Belly Limias (Limia melanogaster) and a pair of Spotted Sawfins (Skiffia multipunctata). These are all livebearers and I will talk about them more in upcoming posts.
So have you ever purchased an aquarium fish on an impulse? How did that work for you? Please leave a comment below.