RE: [Killietalk] "Where Have All The Killies Gone"

["Brian R. Watters" <bwatters at sasktel_net>]

Nevin Aspinwall wrote:

>
> At the suggestion of Wright Huntley I would like to start a new
> discussion
> thread entitled "Where Have All The Killies Gone".
> In 1998, Jack Heller, Tomas Hrbek, and I brought back a sizeable
> collection
> of killies from Cameroon some of which we propagated and
> distributed widely to
> the hobby. These killies are referenced as "HAH 98". All of us
> are concerned
> about maintaining killies in the hobby. We are all familiar with
> the scenario
> of  a given rare species/location becoming hot, then becoming widely
> distributed, then becoming common, then falling out of favor, and
> then disappearing from
> the hobby. Once a given species/location become extirpated in the
> hobby it
> necessitates someone going back to Cameroon or elsewhere and
> re-collecting-- a
> very expensive proposition. In my one trip to Cameroon and three trips to
> Gabon, I have spent about $5,000 per trip.
> So, I would like to conduct a survey of killie keepers on the Web
> to see how
> many of our collections are still extant in the hobby......
>

Nevin, you raise an interesting and valid point but there really is no
mystery to this. The hobby has a finite capacity and can support only a
certain number of species, new or old, it doesn't matter. There simply are
not enough hobbyists and tanks out there to support all the species and
populations that have been coming into the hobby in recent years. Also, with
such a variety available on an almost on-going basis, hobbyists tend to move
from one new species to the next. The result of this is that many
species/populations simply get left out and eventually become lost in the
hobby.

I have had the same experience as you but on an even larger scale. With a
variety of colleagues and sometimes on my own, I have carried out more than
25 field/collecting trips and, at a rough count have brought back specimens
of about 400 species/populations of Nothos and over a 100 of lampeyes (I
have also documented many more localities where I did not retain any
specimens). I would guess that I have, to various extents, introduced
perhaps 60-70% of those into the hobby. I could ask the same question -
where are they all now ? However, I know the answer - if one adds up all the
Notho keepers in the AKA (plus all the other Killie groups if you like)
there simply aren't enough of them to maintain all those
species/populations. I have often been asked why then do I bother to bring
them back. My reasons are varied and I won't go into that here but,
primarily it is for research and photographic documentation. These days, I
actually introduce into the hobby a lesser proportion (than I used to) of
the fish I bring back, for the reasons mentioned above.

In my opinion, if one's primary objective in making a collecting trip is to
introduce species/populations into the hobby, then one will be wasting
substantial resources and be sorely disappointed by the outcome even over
the short term. Perhaps I am overdramatizing it but one might also be doing
the hobby a disservice in that it will become even more overloaded with
fish.
___________________________________________
Brian R. Watters
University of Regina
Regina, Sask. S4S 0A2, Canada
Ph: (306) 584-9161 (home); (306) 585-4663 (work)
Fax: (306) 585-5433
E-mail: bwatters at sasktel_net



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