Re: [Killietalk] Commercial imports; what to label them?

[Gary Elson or Mary Frauley <fraulels at videotron_ca>]

David et al;
      Okay, there are other fish that have collection codes. I'll give you
that. But nobody has addressed one of my questions and the one I feel is
most important. Why should a given pair of killies kept and bred in a
hobbyists tank keep a collection code from a location that they are
extremely remote from in terms of generations of fish.
John J.

Hi John,

Here's my shot at an answer. No killie currently kept in captivity is
extremely remote from its habitat in terms of generations. The timelines of
nature are enormous. Twenty, thirty, forty or more years in relation to the
time it has taken these species and populations to evolve to what we see?
That's a small curve in a long road.

I do not buy the theory there is massive genetic change in tank-raised fish
after a few generations. It's conceivable, but we talk like it's a rule.
Yes, individuals best adapted to aquarium life will live to reproduce. No
big change there. A lot of "wilds" have a smooth transition to tank life.
Yes, we inbreed some of our fishes - a real problem linked to their aquarium
environment. I think most of the changes we see in killies after a few
captive generations are environmental. I have a punctatum population here. I
started with a fair group of wild fish, in 2003. I group spawned them, and
have continued to group spawn them. The original collector, Oliver Lucanus,
saw them a few weeks ago and noted how subtly different they were from the
fish he found in a shallow, cool, flowing leaf littered forest stream. He's
right - all the colours are there, but the proportions have shifted. They
now live and breed in 15 gallon glass boxes on a totally different diet
under totally different lighting. I'll bet that if they were returned to the
kind of biotope they came from, they'd return to their original colours.

However, if I ever encounter another punctatum and cross them with my Buong
Bai locality, I might soon see the changes longterm geographic isolation in
nature can bring. The fish may appear the same but be reproductively
incompatible, giving "mules". I can't see crossing punctatum Buong Bai from
my house in Montreal with punctatum Buong Bai from Toronto doing that. I'd
like to live long enough for that to be a likely outcome, but.

To me, if an individual killie gets eaten by a bird or caught and brought
home by a human, its fate's the same. As far as their being active, dynamic
parts of the environment that formed them, they're as good as dead. So the
codes are for us, and if we're not studying the fish scientifically, are
there to provide info on what the fish should look like and how we should
breed it. That seems useful to me.

Gary E.


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