at the fish farm and putting it in your tank at home can be as short as a few days or as long as a week or more. Shipping fish across such great distances puts them under incredible stress. The pH of the water in the shipping bags is often dangerously low, and the level of ammonia and nitrites very high. Many improvements have been made in shipping practices, primarily those by the Singapore fish breeders but also those by the Florida Tropical Fish Farms Association (FTFFA). Inevitably, some fish do not survive shipment, but considering the tremendous volume of fish shipped all around the world every week, the actual losses are negligible. When you realize how far the fish you buy in your local fish store have traveled—halfway around the world or farther—you can appreciate how hardy tropical fish in general, and angelfish in particular, must be.
HABITAT DESTRUCTION
Even though their angelfish most likely come from commercial farms rather than from the wild, folks who keep tropical fish—and who usually care about animals and the natural world—should be aware that the natural environment of angelfish is under tremendous destructive pressures. The Amazon rain forest is the largest pristine jungle and rain forest in the world—sometimes called the lungs of the planet because the huge amount of plant biomass it contains absorbs so much carbon dioxide and gives off so much oxygen. This vital resource for all the inhabitants of the earth is being systemically destroyed on a major, and constant, scale. Economic interests such as logging, mining, and farming are cutting down the trees of the rain forest by clear cutting, destroying ecosystems by mining for minerals, and then dumping chemicals on what is left of the land so people can grow forage crops and raise cattle.
A group of angelfish spend some time at a holding station in Manacapuru, Brazil. These fish display unusual patterns of stripes on their bodies, typical of recently caught angelfish acclimating to an aquarium environment.
A fisherman does his job along the Amazon, amid the typical tangle of fallen trees, branches, and driftwood, where angelfish are found.
Many groups are actively trying to preserve and protect the Amazon rain forest. One that is integrally bound with the tropical fish hobby is Project Piaba. Piaba is the generic name the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon River basin give to any small fish, especially the less colorful species that swim with the cardinal tetra (Paracheirodon axelrodi). The motto of Project Piaba is “Buy a Fish, Save a Tree,” and the mission of the organization is to support the local fishermen and their families who make their living collecting ornamental aquarium fish, the most important one of which is the cardinal tetra. In a somewhat counterintuitive manner, Piaba wants hobbyists to buy fish that have been responsibly collected in an “eco-friendly” way from the Amazon by these fishermen.
The Amazon rain forest is one of the last untouched pristine jungles left in the world, and humankind is doing its best to try to destroy it. Logging, mining, and farming interests destroy huge tracts of rain forest daily, in the name of “progress.” Project Piaba and other organizations are working hard to preserve the rain forest; please support these efforts.
Project Piaba had its origins in studies on the fishing industry around the town of Barcelos on the Rio Negro, conducted by ichthyology professor Ning Labbish Chao in the late 1980s. Barcelos is the center for the collection of the cardinal tetra, which are collected by the millions and shipped by boat from Barcelos down to Manaus at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Solimões. Dr. Chao has begun to organize the local fishermen in Barcelos, and he has established a system of permits for the collection of ornamental fish. That was the first step toward making sure that the products of the Amazon rain forest, a large share of which are ornamental tropical fish, are harvested on a sustainable basis and ultimately that the rain forest is preserved. If the fishermen can make their living by selling the ornamental fish, which are essentially a renewable rain forest resource, they will protect their fishing grounds from destruction by the loggers, miners, and farmers. Local fish stores in the United States are beginning to offer eco-friendly fish from sources approved by Project Piaba. When you see fish in your local fish store that are labeled as being wild caught from the Amazon—cardinal tetras, rummy noses, hatchet fish, Otocinclus, and bleeding hearts, to name a few—you can feel good about buying them and doing your part to protect the Amazon rain forest.
Dr. Ning Labbish Chao spends time out in the field, working with the fish.
Scott Dowd, of Project Piaba and the New England Aquarium, and I ran a test project involving some of the local fish stores to which I wholesale fish. We wanted to know if retail customers of the fish stores would prefer cardinal tetras that were taken from the wild in an environmentally responsible manner, as with Project Piaba, over commercially farmed cardinal tetras. Unfortunately, we had trouble keeping the commercially farmed cardinals alive, which we presume is only a temporary problem, one that will be solved eventually as it has been with most other ornamental tropical fish. Even though we didn’t have a full opportunity to test the actual choice, we were very pleased to see from our surveys that the vast majority of the customers, once they understood why it is better to purchase wild cardinals—because the fishermen protect the rain forest—preferred the wild-caught cardinal tetras. Many of the respondents said that they would even be willing to pay a premium for the wild-caught fish, knowing that by doing so they would be helping preserve the Amazon rain forest.
Wild-caught cardinal tetras swim in a home aquarium. These fish are a good choice for the hobbyist interested in helping preserve the Amazon rain forest.
| CHAPTER 2 | Angelfish Groups |
There are a number of learned ichthyology books and papers, as well as a great number of Web sites, about what are called the meristics of angelfish—scale and fin counts, minute measurements of the lateral line, and other anatomical details. Most hobbyists (and I include myself in this group) are not much interested in these arcana, and I will not go into them here. If you are interested in the in-depth study of angelfish, a list of Web sites is provided at the end of this book. For now, a basic discussion of angelfish characteristics is in order.
THREE SPECIES OF ANGELFISH
Dr. Sven Kullander of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm has done the most recent, and so far the definitive, work of classifying the species of angelfish. Today it is generally accepted that there are three species of angelfish, collectively assigned the genus Pterophyllum. The three species considered valid by Kullander are P. scalare, P. altum, and P. leopoldi. According to Kullander, Pterophyllum scalare are sometimes referred to as P. eimekei and P. dumerilii, names he rates as “junior” synonyms, which means that fish called by these names are, in fact, P. scalare and that the first published name (in this case, P. scalare) takes precedence over the names that were published later. (The other two species names, P. altum and P. leopoldi, are considered valid by Kullander. For excellent documentation of the history of scientific nomenclature of the angelfish, see http://www.finarama.com/tba/timeline.htm.)
