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when Keegan—then quite a bit younger—first started showing
real interest in my aquariums, he couldn’t understand my
lack of interest in keeping “cool” fish.
Why wouldn’t
I let him put that 10-inch clown knife fish and that 8-inch
tiger shovelnose catfish in my 180-gallon show tank? After
all, all I had to show off was a group of relatively small cichlids.
It
wasn’t hard to explain that, with the clown knife
and shovelnose catfish, I would not have any of my cichlids
very long.
More difficult was explaining my preference for the small cichlids—dwarf
and semi-dwarf African species—over the larger and admittedly
showier fish he would regularly bring to my attention.
“Keegan,”
I explained, “through the years I’ve kept large and
small fish, and I still get a thrill out of seeing a beautiful,
large show specimen in an aquarium.
“But
day-to-day I like to watch an aquarium that provides as much of
a natural environment for the fish as possible…where the
fish look like they belong, instead of looking out of place.
“That’s
a lot easier to accomplish when you put small fish into a large
aquarium. They become more interesting because they behave normally.
They’re even more interesting when the small fish have the
intelligence of cichlids. See?”
“Sure,
dad. I see what you mean,” Keegan replied. “You think
we can set up a special tank for the knife fish and shovelnose
cat?”
It
took a a couple of years—and one national cichlid (ACA) convention—to
do the trick, but finally came the words a father hears all too
seldom:
“Dad,
you were right. I like the aquariums with the smaller cichlids
much better. What say I trade in the catfish and knife fish somewhere
and make my tank a cichlid aquarium?”
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