longhairedgit longhairedgit
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  • Posted on: 4/6/2008 16:35
Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #1
As you might remember I posted this pic a few months back, bout mid march, nice baby uaru. I bought two. I went back to get more,a few weeks later but someone else bought them.

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...and so mine grew up, happily enough, dutifully destroyed just about every plant I own and had a whale of a time doing it. Fairs fair I knew they were herbivorous and the plants were sacrificial. I plied them with veg of various sorts, livefoods, they both grew a real love of hikari algae wafers. They now look like this , about the size of a young adult discus, or a yearling severum, basically about 6 inch.

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Then im back at the same shop and see some more Uaru, three for ?15 , bargain thinks I, grabs wallet and the nearest lass who sells the fish. I said, "whos breeding these then" cos mine were pretty good specimens, though these looked a little rougher. She replies "oh these are the same batch as yours, the guy who bought them after you got some brought them back".

"WTF?" says I.

This is why.

They are a third the size of mine!

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Not the shops fault this time, in fact aquajardin have been pretty damn good as a fish supplier, but how the hell did the guy that bought them before keep them for christ sake? Mine regulate their own dietary intake, they eat what they need and then stop, these little guys just eat all the time! They are so paranoid about not getting fed they eat like a wolfpack!

In one breath we have to tell people not to overfeed goldfish, in the other am I really gonna have to start telling people to actually feed cichlids too? Crap skinny blue acaras, wilting oscars, tiny uaru, bony geophagus, not to mention the oxydoras....I see them in shops all over.

How cheap do you have to be to not feed the damn fish? I have Uaru who are brethren, the same batch of damn fry, who cannot be put in the same aquaria for 2 months because the ones I bought first are so big theyd beat the crap out of them, and the new ones are so underdeveloped they cant win a fight with a keyhole cichlid!

The word for that is FUBAR.
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Coralline Coralline
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  • Posted on: 4/6/2008 17:20
Re: Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #2
if it wasnt so serious, i would be laughing! thats amazing! but one plus point, at least he took them back to the shop rather than killed them off...
at least you will feed them properly and get them up to a normal size/weight for their age.
ok, just linking back to your book, i think more emphasis than previousley thought on diet, and relating to how fish should grow (and would) in the wild. using the example of my friend with two angelfish in a 10gallon tank who arent exactly small anymore, but are not as big as they should be by any stretch of the imagination, but they do exist on flake and less than ideal maintenance, she insists they are happy, i can see they arent, but as theres no 'illness' she wont accept theres anything wrong.
Gill

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[url=http://www.fishkeeping.co.uk/articles_51/fishless-cycling-article.htm] 'CLICK ME' - 'Fishless Cycling' information - how to prepare your new t...
longhairedgit longhairedgit
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  • Posted on: 4/6/2008 19:56
Re: Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #3
Oh god, tell me about it, angels must be the single most dwarfed tropical fish there is. If you really dont want them to dwarf at all and reach the full growth potential you pretty much have to get them into a tall 55 gal in the first year, and if you really genuinely want to get them to max out its really 100 gals plus at least. Ive got a scalare black thats at least 10 inches tall, the one that died recently was over 8, but people just dont seem to believe they can get that big.

Ive seen altums well over a foot tall. Most peoples never get much over 5 or 6 inches, but its not their true size potential, they are dwarfed. Yet reputable sources will say angels in a "20 or a 30 gallon, oh thats fine".

Its just another species that has become so popular (and in this hobby popular often equates to expendable) and democratised as suitable for everyone, that they find themselves in aquaria smaller than is healthy.

My first angels were raised in 30 gals, even though they got the big tanksizes later in life the developmental damage of my first 3 years of ownership saw them never get beyond 6 inches. Others I aquired later put straight into 100 gal aquaria were literally twice the size, twice as fast, maxed out in 3-4 years.
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longhairedgit longhairedgit
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  • Posted on: 4/6/2008 20:12
Re: Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #4
In fact on a quiz on pfk's site I noticed a little question (perhaps a deliberately loaded question) which was "do fish get to the sizes listed in books and by the pros?" The public answered no for the majority, but of course, I and other high end keepers with big aquaria know that the fish with the exception of a few ridiculous old quotes for some catfish species that they really really do get that big, but as a trend aquaria per head of capita averages are probably getting smaller and dwarfing more common, and this is in accordance with filter technology and better knowledge of water changes.In ye olde days of fishkeeping people had naff filters so the only thing that kept the fish alive was massive water volume, usually didnt dwarf, and more specimenns were wild caught as adults.


In ye olde dys you wouldnt have seen angels in less than a 100 gallon anyway. It might have been some baroque style iron framed tank lit by natural daylight on a bloody great marble plinth in kew gardens, but it was huge nonetheless. It had to be, they were running planted filterless.
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longhairedgit longhairedgit
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  • Posted on: 12/7/2008 7:07
Re: Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #5
Just a picture update of how all of them are getting on.

Not quite sure why I've warmed to them so much, and "poor mans discus" they may be, but there's something about them that discus don't have, probably something about their personality, that I like. Hopefully these pics describe something of what I see in them. Have a mini-gallery of Uaru. Enjoy!


First the smaller ones muching on a few cubes of freeze dried tubifex...

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...and then the big boys.

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Goldnugget Goldnugget
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  • Posted on: 12/7/2008 8:24
Re: Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #6
Beautiful pics, the last one seems to show some really nice patternation on the operculum, is that just a trick of the light???
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[url=http://www.fishkeeping.co.uk/articles_51/fishless-cycling-a
longhairedgit longhairedgit
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  • Posted on: 12/7/2008 18:49
Re: Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #7
Its really there, he blushes in and out of it several times a day.
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TetraLinz TetraLinz
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  • Posted on: 12/7/2008 18:57
Re: Uaru - dont they grow.....at least when you feed em! #8
Beautiful fish LH I agree with GN about the patterns on the operculum.
T.L
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