Category: Fish and Aquaria

Moscow Zoo Aquarium


This was my first ever of what I’ll call my “gallery” videos. Basically that’s a slideshow, like the old “gallery” in Vision On with Tony Hart. Here the music is Moscow Nights. Here on HTV there should also be a categorising of background music used in these films. I’ll be trying to include that here too.

All these photos were taken by me in the Moscow Zoo aquarium with the stills function of my mini DV cam. I haven’t been able to transfer the video footage as yet from that, but I’ll no doubt get to it one day…

The Searcher: A Novel
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Convict and Pim

This was another early attempt at aquarium filming. This convict cichlid was bought initially in an attempt to breed with a sajica, but they all turned out to be males. I no longer believe any fish shop with promises a female cichlid, They all sell you males as females, they are like Svejk with the dogs.

After the sajica was no more, the convict lived with this Pimelodus fasciatus, which was a good match for it, being a lot bigger. That pim died only late this year after living in my tanks for about 4 years. I first bought it from a tank of much bigger cichlids in a shop where it had been roughed up a bit. At the start it had a broken barbel, but that fixed itself in time.

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One fine aquarium in Szczecin

The background to this film is the fact that on Gazeta Wyborcza’s website (the most successful newspaper website I should say in Poland) I did quite a bit of forum stuff. I ran a private forum for Foreigners Living in Poland which you can find here, and also I spent some time on the Fishkeeping private forum on there, which is all in Polish. That’s where I made the acquaintance of this guy from Szczecin, who gave me some plants – I probably still have the genetic successors of some of them – and there he let me film his tank in his student room, while I was in Szczecin just to do an AGM appearance, which is a sort of cameo part that auditors of companies are called upon to do from time to time. I did mine the next day, and I can tell you there were some unusually straight faces around that table – not much fun I can tell you. But the film of Arsik’s tank has become pretty popular on YT – about 10 hits a day over the last four years – which just goes to show that there is always call on YouTube for pretty fishtanks and fish and plants.

This is about the first time on a film that you hear me speaking Polish, by the way.

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Is there life outside the mouth?

Geophagus hondae babies

As an adjunct to the earlier film on the fish with a mouthful, this shows the babies whenever they come out. They don’t need long to go back in again whenever danger threatens.

Quite a few animals use their mouths to protect their young, mouthbrooding is especially associated with fishes but also is practised by crocodiles.

It is quite surprising that it is not more broadly practiced throughout the animal kingdom, as it is a very interesting and practical survival trait. If evolution were true, surely there would be much more of this going on than in a few disparate families?

Evolutionists of course will quickly point out the downside pay-off – they will say that a fish with its mouth full of young itself becomes more tempting a morsel for predators and cannot escape so easily, or that it cannot fight, or that it can’t eat while it has a mouthful of young. Each of those defences are fairly facile, but typical of the sort of dreamt up nonsense that is trolled out regularly to support the theory of evolution.

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A fish with a mouthful!

Geophagus hondae mouthbrooding

This is the same tank as you saw the Megalichthys in and in fact these Geophagus hondae were breeding while the catfishes were in there with them, but because of their great mouthbrooding ability, they didn’t lose many of the fry.

You can see the full chin and cheeks being a dead giveaway that she has a lot of babies, which we will see in another clip.

The species used to be called Geophagus steindachneri, but that was considered a bit of a mouthful in itself and so it got shortened to ‘hondae’, since Honda was actually Steindachner’s favorite motorbike.

"Ja, ja. Zose vere ze days!"

Here we see the old Austrian ichthyologist himself reminiscing about riding his Honda bike in and out of Harvard Yard making as much noise as possible at two o’clock in the morning and waking up all the undergraduates, as well as Louis Agassiz.

Franz Steindachner, incidentally, would have made a great mouthbrooder as his copious beard would have provided additional cover for the fry as well as looking serious and this warning off predators.

And that’s another thing we don’t get to do in YouTube, either, and that is add still images next to the videos.  This one is from Wikipedia, so it has the GNU licence.

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