Page 12 - TBAS-may-2018

-12- TBAS May 2018 ....................

A way long time ago . . . about 1968-69 . . . I was a student at Purdue University
and I had just gotten married. The wife and my fish tanks (plural . . . ☺☺☺)
moved into a house on the South side of Lafayette, Indiana and started to go
about our business. Then I decided to join the local fish club . . . GLAS – Greater
Lafayette Aquarium Society. I met the president, Bill Dyer (what a grand nice
man!!!), and all sorts of the members at the first meeting and the GLAS and I was
off to the races. It didn’t take too long for Bill Dyer (maybe 60 yrs old at the time)
to start to talk to me about killifish. I had heard about killifish because I had been
reading EVERYTHING I could get my hands on since maybe 1950-51 (5-6 years
old). Bill invited me over to his house and he had maybe 20-30 tanks and almost
all were stocked with all sorts of different killifish.
Ok . . . I bought my first pair of killifish from Bill and I was home to add killifish
to my “heard”. As best I recall my first killifish was an Aphyosemion gardneri
. . . basically a plant spawner and nothing was new except I now had killifish and
that was good!
The next time I went to Bill’s house . . . maybe 3-4 weeks later he had
some other killifish . . . Nothobranchius!! He had about a dozen or so and he
began to explain how they spawned in nature, He said that Nothobranchius
spawned in the mud at the bottom of African ponds and when the ponds dried up
the eggs stayed in the mud basically dry for from 3 months to up to 7-8-9 months
depending on the species of Nothobranchius. I had to ask him maybe
3-4 times that night if he REALLY meant that fish eggs dried up in mud and waited for
the rains to come in 4-5-6 months . . . YES he said 3-4 times . . . OK – I WAS
HOOKED ON NOTHOBRANCHIUS – BIG TIME!!! Fish that lived in water
spawned in bottom mud and it dried for MONTHS and waited for the rain to
hatch. Mother Nature had really done her trick this time . . . and I have never lost
my love for Nothobranchius and I never stop telling people about Mother Nature
and her Nothobranchius.
Fast forward to the mid 1990’s and I was sitting in an SKS (Suncoast Killifish
Society) and I wasn’t the only one at the meeting that loved Nothobranchius but
we had a surprise in store. Attending the SKS meeting was a friend of Charlie

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