They are all surviving good. Today I finally was able to get ahold of some brine shrimp eggs that hatched for me so the killifish will get live food finally. I have been feeding a liquafry food. I am hoping that with live food they will start to grow faster. I have 8 Gardneri fry growing. I hope that once I get a few pairs I can sell enough of them to buy a membership in the AKA. I am selling killifish eggs on aquabid of Fp. Gardneri Misaje under the username Tomskillifish. It is an auction for 10+ eggs. I want to sell pairs of fish but nothing is ready yet. So I can join and get the newsletters in the mail I am selling eggs. I currently keep Fp. Gardneri Misaje, Fp. Gardneria Clauseni Akure, Aphyosemion Striatum LEC 93/29, and Aphyosemion Australe Orange. I currently am only breeding the Misaje. I plan to within the next few weeks start working with the Aphyosemion Striatum LEC 93/29. I have had them before but have had trouble breeding them. I have gotten eggs a couple of times but they fungus. So my goal is to actually get them to lay eggs and hatch. I was thinking maybe storing them on peat would help liek it did for the Fp. Gardneri Misaje. I have bred the Fp. Gardneri Clauseni Akure before but that has been a couple of years and the group I have now is all new. I plan to set them up at some point. They are one of my favorite killifish. Although recently getting a pair of Fp. Gardneri Misaje through oddball pets in pittsburgh I have grown to like them best. Actually I had to request them as they only had males left. Eric Bodrock sells the oddball their killifish and he brought in a pair for me to buy. Once the Fp. Gardneri Misaje got settled and became less skittish around me ,as they were completely terrified if I even entered the room, I fell in love with their great personalities. It was cool once I got them breeding for me. I got them to breed while they were still skittish if they noticed me come into the room. So I was going to go to bed as I have all my tank in my bedroom, They help relax me and get me off to sleep, and well they were breeding in the spawning mops and since they had not noticed me I went back to the living room and let them do their thing. They layed alot of eggs but only the current 8 hatched out. I think because they are young the eggs were not as fertile. Well I have to go and take care of the fish. Time to feed the fry. Hopefully being fed live food will get them to grow quicker for me. I am just nervous they won't all make it. So far though I have not lost any of the original 8. Hopefully I can earn enough money to join the AKA. I am only going to use what I earn from fish breeding to pay for it as I am in college and work a minimum wage job and that has to pay for my car.

Hey Santaaa!

A lot of us can sure identify with your experience raising fishes as a student or when we first started out. We probably used abacuses when I was an undergraduate. Raised livebearers. Took study breaks in the library and drooled over Scheel's articles and images of killies that seemed inaccessible. (And I was wrong about that!)

Many killie keepers, even those with a big investment in tanks or a fishroom, have a reputation as being a bit (um) frugal. Part of that is because, especially in this economy (Death spiral? "We're not afraid of no steenking death spiral!" Petrified, yes!), or as a student (with your vow of poverty), we have to be frugal. (Several odd jobs paid me a generous $1/hr about 2000 years ago.)

Another reason is that if the event is attended by several experienced killie-nuts, they have probably have had most of the killies you are just getting acquainted with. They may have had them several times. One isn't going to bid on gardneri Misaje the same way as on the latest super cool, rare, hard-to-keep killie. The rumor at last Saturday's ChiKA meeting was that there will be a new, especially awesome Notho. at the AKA national. Guesses on what the bids at the Sunday auction at the national were impressive. Not figuring for inflation, a pair of those Nothobranchius may go for more than what one of my college automobiles cost in the late 1960s. [$200 before repairs and a promise to stay friends with the seller. :) ]

Your choices of lyretails, striatum and gardneri for a shop are very wise. Those killies, along with blue gularis and dageti, have gotten more press in the slicks and aquarium club pubs than most killifish. There is a recognition factor.

Also, with the exception of the australe, they are among the easier of killies to raise.

Offer maybe 5 pairs. Don't sell them so many that they can't move them.

You will also probably get a better price for gardneri or striatum in a general club auction than at a killie auction.

At the general auction there will be more people there who have not kept them and who will be dazzled by their new discoveries. (And our tank of gardneri P-82 still takes my breath away!)

By the way, if you can find an independent shop (or an exceedingly rare, savvy, big box manager) that will buy killies, realize that retail prices are 3 or 4 times what wholesale is. Price your pairs or extra males at 1/3 of what retail is.

If that sounds unfair, consider that rare is the shop that even breaks even on livestock. If they make any profit, it is usually on dry goods or aquarium gear. (The ma and pa shops that have disappeared have often done so because too many people began getting their dog food and fish supplies on-line or at the big boxes.)

Also be a little thick-skinned and patient about the reception of your fish. Some people, even those who know better, will assume that they are so much more skilled and informed that your are, they will will refuse to cover the tank tightly. Maybe give them a 1-page, large print set of suggestions for keeping your gardneri happy.

Don't look back. I did one time just as the owner was dropping one of my prized black mollies in the ribbon eel tank.

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You mentioned success with australe and frustration with striatum. Sometimes we do just get a pair of breeders that is sterile or that takes forever to adjust to the water. Of course you may have tried the australe and learned to care for them in ways which you hadn't known with the striatum. ;) If you try the striatum again, I'll bet they do well for you.

Even a very accomplished aquarist complained about the unproductivity of his australe. Almost automatically I asked if he could collect clean rainwater. (Standard response #4.) I was really jealous of his quick affirmative.

The next time he drove up to a CKA meeting (200 miles - he stayed over with family) he arrived with a couple wonderful pairs of golden lyretails, among other treasures. "All" such a hard-working aquarist had to do was to graaaaaaadually dilute his seasoned, treated tap water with rain water until the lyretails began laying good eggs. He just kept that water "recipe" and continued to crank them out.

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A word of administrivia: the name of the fish's genus is capitalized; the species and subspecies (if mentioned) start with a lower case letter. If it is a color strain (red in English or rot in German) it may be either, depending upon local custom. The collecting locality of course is capitalized.

So you have Fp. gardneri Misaje. If you wish to dazzle those unfamiliar with killies, you could use the subspecies and it would be Fundulopanchax gardneri nigerianus Misaje. I might add though that subspecies in some instances (as with gardneri clauseni or gardneri nigerianus) are very controversial, difficult to distinguish one from another and maybe better skipped. Heck at a killie club meeting the auctioneer may just start with, "We have a pair of Misaje here!" because virtually everyone there knows what they are.

On aquabid.com people who really know better capitalize every word or in one case just capitalize every letter in the killifish's name. For the most part this is just slovenly laziness.

(Hey and I'm lazy enough to just right click on the mouse, highlight and copy a name & then right click to paste that name into something written. A no-brainer, by reflex, but done more correctly.)

Oddly there is one person who does that perhaps because he doesn't want people to think of him as too smart. An unusual form of humility...

Rarely there is someone who compromises their integrity by inventing a name, guessing a location or even using an obsolete name in an ad. For instance, what we know today as Fp. scheeli and have known since 1970 to some years ago as Aphyosemion scheeli, was known in the 1960s as the Burundi Aphyosemion. Actually that is kind of a dumb name, but it certainly sounded exotic. (Aphyosemion have yet to be found in Burundi.) A civil war raged in southeast Nigeria and it made no sense to wander around in that conflagration studying little fishes.

Yet despite that species being known as scheeli for forty years, there have been ads on-line and even in one case (before Matt Goo) slipped into the F&E listing in the last 20 years for Burundi Aphyosemion. Be very careful with or avoid sellers like that. (Of course one might get a good deal on that guy's grandmother.)

All the best!