Speaker 1: Pet Life Radio, Let's Talk Pets.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Aquarium Mania. I'm your host, doctor Royanan, speaking
to you from the University of Florida IPHIS Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory.
Thanks for joining us. Where in the world are Sunda,
Wallasea and Sahul My guest today? Sam Fernald, a lifelong aquarist, taxonomist,
and founder and co owner of Hillstream Kingdom LLC, a
specialty aquarium fish wholesaler based in Maine and Guangdong, has
a great appreciation for and expertise with the fishes from
these areas around Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. These
include the unusual and beautiful Hillstream loaches. Join us as
Sam explains the geologic and evolutionary importance of their native
ranges and shares his passion and interest in bringing these
beautiful new species into the aquarium hobby. We'll be right
back after these messages.
Speaker 3: You know the expression cats have nine lives? Well, what
if you can give them one more? But give them ten?
Movement is on a mission to help give cats an
extra life. How with spae and neoter Spain or neotering
your cat helps them live a longer, healthier life. And
it helps control free roaming cat populations too. Learn more
about the benefits of spee and neuter and meet Scooter,
the neutered cat at give them ten dot Org. That's
give them ten dot org.
Speaker 4: Let's talk pets on petlife radio dot com.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to aquarium Mania on tet life Radio. My
guest today is Sam Fernald, lifelong aquarist, founder and co
owner of Hillstream Kingdom LLC, and expert on hillstream loaches
and other freshwater fishes from around Southeast Asia and the
South Pacific. So, Sam, we finally are meeting to have
this interview. I'm real excited. Yeah, have some personal questions
to ask, of course. First, so how did you first
become interested in fish and aquariums?
Speaker 5: Oh gosh, So one of my earliest memories is being
in Las Vegas and my dad's holding me and there's
this giant saltwater aquarium. I found out that that's what
it was years later, but I remembered staring into this
ocean and it was, I guess, some aquarium and a
casino lobby in Las Vegas. One of my earliest memories.
How it programmed me. Later on, I started getting really
interested in the pet store as soon as I could talk,
that would be like where I wanted to go, and
so I instantly was drawn to having an aquarium as
soon as my little memory can kick in, and my
parents are like, you know, eventually, eventually, eventually.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, I grew up in Maine, is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, rural Maine, mid coast. So we grew up in Rockport.
It's part of a five town, like traditional New England village,
so we have a lot of lobs from in that's
part of our industry. And then we really relying on tourism,
so it's pretty dead for the whole year beside summer,
and so summer, when the weather's perfect, that's when everyone
comes to their summer houses and us townies kind of
get stuck with the traffic.
Speaker 2: Nice. So can you describe your very first tank if
you can remember it, how big it was, and maybe
some fish you had?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So it's actually a pretty good story.
So we had this local pet shop called Hot Hollie
Docks and my Grampy, who just recently passed away in
early June, a day after his birthday, his ninety Sorry
but but ah, thanks. He had a good life. Though
he had a lot of hobbies, and aquariums and garden
ponds were one of them. And so another very first
memory of mine is going to his house where him
and my grammy retired to was just a little ranch
and they had dug out three little ponds that were
connected by streams, and every year, even though it was
illegal to do so in Maine, he would go and
buy a couple goldfish at Holly Docks, and this is
the early nineties, and so he put them into the
cons and be like a shish stop telling you one.
And I thought it was the coolest thing. And so
he would tell me stories about his fish tanks. And
he had saved all of his tropical fish keeping books
so he had I could go pull him out later
and they were gifted to me after he passed. But
he has like some of the original tropical fish and
illustrated fish husband read books, and I thought they were
the coolest thing. I couldn't read them, but I'd sit
there flip through the pages and I think that's the
first time I saw like a real nice hobbyist fish
tank fully planted, and it was like, I want that.
Never gave it up, never gave it up. Seventh birthday,
I come home and we lived in this kind of little,
shoddy apartment, and sitting in the middle of our kind
of dim living room was this glowing forty tall and
my gran Fee had been keeping it at his house
and he had totally pimped it out there. He had
that crystal glass kind of paint that you could paint
the back of aquariums and it would kind of give
you like a frozen ice pattern. He had done it
with lime green. It had the plants with the little
lead wrapping at the bottom for the weight. They were
Albino Corri's cardinal tetras and I think pork choprass borus. Wow,
that's awesome, great surprise. Yeah, best gift I was ever given.
I think, very cool, very cool.
Speaker 2: So fast forward a little bit and we're going to talk,
obviously more about some of the specifics of somebodyse Can
you tell us about your current fishroom, how many tanks
and maybe what types of fish you have? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So there are sixteen ten gallons in my personal fishroom.
So I have two facilities, my personal fishroom and then
my wholesale facility, my personal in home facility. I have
sixteen ten gallons fixed, twenty talls, and three forty breeders,
and then I have display tanks scattered around the house.
Speaker 2: So your hardcore and hardcore pretty much all fish from
the areas we're going to talk about for the most part. Yeah,
only those areas. Okay, those areas great, Great, So I'm
gonna fast forward a little bit. You obviously went to
college and then graduate school. Did your fish in aquarium
keeping kind of follow you there? And or I guess
how did you choose what you ended up kind of
studying and why as well?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I was always good at the hard sciences
and that biology chemist street kind of came easy, so
naturally it seemed like i'd follow one of those degrees.
So I initially chose biology, but then I fell into
human biology, still a little more focused on vertebrates, and
then proluctives. You get to take sociology and psychology class
so that's where I got my BA in and sadly,
I did not keep aquariums all the way through college,
but I did have potted plants, and I got really
into watching what people were doing in terms of aquascaping.
So I felt like those years while I was learning
my trade essentially, or the first part of my trade.
I was also learning what other people were doing in
the hobby and kind of you know, connecting all the
gears and deciding what am I going to actually like
assemble in my own fish room one day?
Speaker 2: Okay? And yeah, and I guess now going into what
you had actually studied before we talk about your aquarium
industry career, can you explain your other job as an
amusiologist and all the work you do. It sounds really
interesting and you did mention that's when you gave me
some advice. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So in my undergraduate when I was doing my BA
in human bio, I did a study abroad at the
only liberal arts university in Asia, which is Landon University.
And what drew me to that was they were starting
up a natural history department and their natural history department
was and it did end up becoming the best in Asia.
And so when I went, I was taken under the
wing of a professor named Lee Kenji and he's kind
of into biotech. He does stuff with the University of
Hong Kong, and then I think also a Shingwa He
was a visiting professor there and he was helping with
the Natural History department and my advisor back at Pitzer,
so I went to the Claremont Colleges, which is an
Oxford style interdisciplinary model, so it's an assembly of five
undergraduate colleges and then a graduate university and then a
biotechnolology school, and I think they're trying to add on
the theology school there too, and the graduate school there
are tons and so that's where I did my master's
degrees and then my doctorate as well, but I did
start out in bio. So jumping back to the bats though,
my undergraduate advisor, Donald McFarland, has an interest in cave
and tombbats, specifically how they teach share during the day
while they're taking refuge in their caves. So he sent
me down there with the camera and we took pictures
of some of Miotis bats, so busper bats, and then
the pipistrials of Guangxi, and then for my senior thesis,
we came back and we actually analyzed the distribution of
the individual cells of bats and they're sure enough they
have their own roosting and heat sharing patterns different across
species in genre. And then for the non I was
responsible for collecting fecal samples from all those bats. And
so they carry like a lot of let's say, rabies,
like viruses, stars like viruses, and humans they are very
susceptible to them. And you know, I don't know how
many people they kill your that infections or something to
try to remedy. And so yeah, that was my that
was my little undergraduate job on Those are my research jobs.
And then I fell into public health for grad school.
I don't really have the stomach to be I guess
like a true clinician that works with other organisms, like
with my hands, like blood death can't do it. So
fish is kind of my tolerance. I can take fish dying,
and anything past that it kind of, you know, my
mental health will get gets a little messed up.
Speaker 2: So I do.
Speaker 5: I do programming and public health now, so I do
population programming, social interventions, so specifically gaged around towards mental
health issues. Yeah, so it's kind of naturally matured into
like a career of today, I guess.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm assuming you were like Ppe during your
back collections and everything. What's that you'd like gloves and
you know, and oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there was a whole protocol,
and so we would go with the professor and then
other students that were also interested in the natural history
program and they would do their stuff too, So it
was kind of like a whole ecosystem sampling. And this
was kind of like the new Western approach. Because it
was a liberal arts school. They just kind of wanted
to list everything that was available in their biome at hand,
and so we went on tons of nature walks. I
don't know if we discussed me actually seeing hillstream loaches,
but I did get to see pseudo gastromize on Myers
in Hong Kong, and that was when my mind was
blown and I was like, oh my god, Asia is
an alien world filled with alien organisms, and the West
cannot even conceive of half of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about fish. I had one quick question,
did you learn Cantonese or Mandarin or it was in English?
Speaker 5: So no. Part of my curriculum was actually taking Cantony
and Mandarin lessons, and I think I got low v's
in them. And I also had to take English too, okay,
and so everyone everyone in Hong Kong speaks perfect English
with a British accent and some of them are trying
to get an American accent. Now that was kind of
after like you know, like they're like social stuff happened
with kind of rejoining the mainland. Kind of their rebellion
was like we're going to get the British accent for
an American accent.
Speaker 2: Now that's funny. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So now pretty much everyone in China, and i'd say
Southeast Asia speaks English. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love it. It's great.
Speaker 5: I think every American should visit there, spend at least
a few weeks to a month.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got to spend some time in Hong Kong
do some work over there. That was, which was which
is cool? In Singapore?
Speaker 5: Where's your family from?
Speaker 2: Originally? My family is actually originally for the Philippines, so
oh wow, which doesn't have Hillstream loaches unfortunately. But that's
all right.
Speaker 5: Now now you have go visa, you have go and
lots of other stuff.
Speaker 2: All right. So as we start our talk on the
fish part, now, I know and I really appreciated your
sending me that link to someone, you know, the talk
you gave from Missouri there Cram Society. I'd heard of
the Walls line and hadn't heard of any of the
other lines, and definitely was not familiar with Sundo, Wallasea
or Sahul. Those are kind of really interesting features and
sort of important, I think for some of the things
we're going to talk about. Can you give us a
brief history in any biogeography lessons to her put these
fish in context? Sure?
Speaker 5: Sure, Sure. So Southeast Asia, I like to think of
it as like the true Atlantis, It's a sunken land.
There are all these island nations that have unique fauna,
and science was always completely perplexed by them. Where do
we actually draw these final lines? And so over time,
a lot of I'd say, like biologists geniuses have tried
to deduce exactly what happened there, and it looks like
there were three little mini continents stund the land, which
would be mainland Asia, though Indo China connecting down to Vietnam,
and then Borneo and Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia would also
have been part of it. And then there was Wallasia,
which was essentially like this pressure cooker of collision where
the continental plates of Asia and Australia, the greater continents
collide and they're pushing up. This land mass together is
kind of bubbling up, and it's this bizarre little almost
I would say, like futuristic ecosystem of baltwater fauna which
have evolved to live in fresh water. So you have
like these outrageously colored shrimp, and so it's its own
little we we'll talk about it, but it's its own
little ecosystem. And so that's Sulawesi is the island, the
main island now, and then Timoor and then I think
the Sewel are part of it as well, and then
sahul The whole is Australia Papua New Guinea, and they
used to be connected, and so a lot of their
fauna is shared. It's like Papua New Guinea's kind of
like a tropical version of Australia, and Australia is like
a more arid, lansy version of Papua New Guinea. And
so the scientists that have visited these areas are finally
put together that about between fifty thousand and five thousand
years ago, so pretty recently in terms of historical events,
like modern anatomical humans like me and you speak in
modern languages, were walking around when the events I'm about
to explain happened. There was a rapid seeking event, so
no one knows exactly what happened, but I've just been
It was like a lowland kind of little Greekish ecosystem
that had persisted for a while and finally tides caught
up with it. But over the course of a few
thousand years and all these islands were split off from
the mainland due to a mass sinking event. So Lord
knows what lies underneath the ocean and the teptonic debris
in the Indo Pacific. I'm sure lots of humans, animals,
and cultures lost and it's recent, so pretty cool. I
think there are a lot of doctorates to be gained
in Asia from say human bio all the way to
like their fauna.
Speaker 2: So yeah, really cool stuff there. Yeah, yeah, definitely, And yeah,
I appreciate that. It was pretty fascinating to kind of
hear about it the first time when you heard you speak.
So what first brought you into these areas and how
did you develop your passion first the interesting species within
these areas.
Speaker 5: I've been lucky enough to have traveled to Asia a
few times in my life. The first was when I
was high school, I did a study abroad program for
the summer in Myanmar, which at the time was called
Burma and Thailand. So I lived around the Changmai area
in northern Thailand, and I kind of got to see
some BALLATORI da there and I was like, oh, this
kind of looked like plucos because they have like local
fish shops where people bring in you know, like their
betas they're breeding Beta. Breeding's pretty big in Thailand. And
then when I was in Meanmar, I got to see
like the fish export happen, so a lot of like
truly like rare animals getting exported at throughout what the
town is that we stayed up, but it's just right
over the border. It's like the tourist ton and Meanmar
back when you could go, I think it's no longer
available for western travel. And then we did stay at
a rural village there and I saw some like wild amphibians.
So then fast forward, I went to study in Hong
Kong and I saw the true Hillstream which is gastrumized
on a day for the first time. Pseudo Gastromi is
on my er See in time Oshan, which is the
main Mountain on Hong Kong's like mainland extension, which is
called in New Territories. We went on a hike and
then this frigid, crystal clear stream. It must have been
ninety degrees with like one hundred and twenty five percent humidity,
so we were like drenched. And in Asia, a lot
of the spring waters cleaned to drink when you get
up pretty high elevations. So Okuser, the Kenji took us
on the walk, was like, you know, you can drink
this stuff. Every time I come here throughout the years,
I fill up my bottle and drink it. So we
went to the spring that pseudo gastromiz on my ERSI
are like frolicking around and we fill our like water glasses,
and it was the coolest thing to me. And I
asked him, like what are those like, you know, like
my little like western eyes. I'm one of the only
American exchange students for the year. Everyone else is like
European or let's say Central Asian, So like you're like
here's Kyrghyzstani's and there's Becky's that were there in Russians too,
and then like they weren't they weren't interested in nature,
like they were just there to learn science. They wanted
to learn how to do chemistry and biotech, and so
essentially professionally, Kunji is like, those are just suckerfish, like
they're everywhere, They're like a zillion million species, like, can't
get rid of them. I fell in love with them,
and I was like, I'm going to have those at
home one day. And so this is my junior year
in college, and sure enough I got to see more
gastromize on today. I got invited by a friend who
was studying abroad in Taiwan to go to Borneo for
two weeks, and we went on this nature walk and
I got to see true gastromiason in incredibly high density.
They almost look like pest snails on rocks. Again in frigid,
crystal clear streams high elevation near the orangutan preserves, and
I wish I knew what species they were, But again
they were in a novelty to me because I'd already
seen like gastrum isson a day, like pseudogastromyason had already
like stolen my heart in Hong Kong. So I was
more interested in the orangutans. So I wish I would
have investigated them, but I didn't.
Speaker 2: That's funny. Yeah, it sounds like you had a lot
of a lot of opportunities to kind of see them
in different areas. We'll go forward a little bit. So
can you tell us what made you found Hillstream Kingdom
LLC and what your and your partner's goals are for
that company.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the Hillstream loaches have always been like some
sort of unattainable thing for me because no one was
importing them. Occasionally, these fish will be imported under the
name either pseudogastro Maayason the Weelia or Gastromayason Wui. And
I'm using air quotes here for people that can't see
me and woy. This is their Latin name. It's not
a scientist name. It just means all mixed together in Asia.
And so prior to like me, it was truly me
and my team dissecting all of their species and assigning
pictures to them based on catch locations. We're coming in mixed,
no one could get permanent colonies of them. What Spot
did a pretty good job of like splitting out contaminants
from like their Ceuelliolini alata offerings.
Speaker 2: That they get through.
Speaker 5: I think it's one of those like like a Hanulai
aquarium or whatever it is, the exporter out of Vietnam
and then Pseudogastromiason would come in and frequently whenever On
Kong would be available for Western export when it wasn't
like having restrictions put on it, and or the occasional
westerner would go over to China to make an actual
partnership because the Chinese are very family oriented and they're
not very prone to doing business with anyone other than
their family members overseas. So my partners are kind of
like a blessing. They're younger than me, mid twenties, my
friend and well he's truly like my they're my friends.
Also we can call each other brothers. That's kind of
like the title I've earned with them through doing business
is they trust me like a family member. Jason Wank
he kind of wants to be like the David Attenborough
of China. So he's making a lot of really cool
homemade documentaries now, and prior to doing that, he did
cameraman work for like the Chinese version at BBC, doing
like local nature documentaries, so he got to play with
like macro lenses, so he does all of our photography.
He also knows the import export game, and we each
kind of like made a fifty to fifty investment into
our import export house. So eventually they want me to
exupport our native North American darters, which are fabulous unheeded
aquarium fish, and people don't know a thing about them.
So the Ethiostoma genus and the persona genus, they're captive
breeding just plain old rainbow darters and green darters and
banded darters in China, and they fetch like eight hundred
Chinese to on, which is like one hundred and twenty bucks,
And here joan Is Aquarium sells them for like eight bucks,
and so no one knows about them. But they're that beautiful.
It is like that's what they're truly worth. And so
the hillstream loaches I wanted them here. I think that
they're worth having aquariums fish rooms like mine. So my
entire fishroom, the only bottom dwellers I have are hillstream loaches.
And let's say past in vertebrates like black worms, white worms,
and microworms and those kind of like they'll feed off
of those, and those feed to fry.
Speaker 2: Okay, great, well, let us take a break, and we'll
take a short break and continue our discussion with my guest,
Sam Fernald of Hillstream Kingdom LLC. After a word from
our sponsors.
Speaker 6: Begging to hear more of your favorite show, Colful. Episodes
of all our shows are available on demand. Go to
fedlife radio dot com to fetch our entire lineup of
powsome ped podcasts. Also dig us up and iHeartRadio and
iTunes talks live only from pet Life Radio.
Speaker 2: Let's talk past talk about headline radio.
Speaker 4: Atlight radio dot com.
Speaker 2: And we're back and continuing our discussion of Hillstream Loaches
with my guest, Sam Fernald of Hillstream Kingdom LLC. All right, Sam,
with that intro and kind of getting to know you
a little bit better and how all this came to be,
Let's dive into the Hillstream loaches more specifically, I guess
let's start with talking about what kind of habitats these
fish usually inhabit Can you explain that to them? Are
our listeners?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah sure. So Hillstream loaches are amazing
and they are endemic to scindaland and so we already
went over to biogeography. So Sindaland ranges from like truly
tropical equatorial and environments like Borneo. The equator literally runs
right through it, and you get hillstream loaches that come
from a little bit more tropical warmer summer, so the
Borneo loaches can take it quite warm. They'll come from
hill streams, but I kind of call them more like
jungle creeks, so you'll see like more of like a
jungle gravelly substrate with them, and more of smoothed out
rock ledges like you see in South America, more of
like a reddish substrate to those streams. And so the
gastrumizon and neo gastrum Iason which are also from there,
and hyper gastromizon, those are jungle creek fish. They're really
flexible in temperature. They can go down to the low
sixties all the way up to the high eighties with
proper water turnover, because those hillstreams never stop moving. And
then the hillstream loaches can also be found in what
I would call two hillstreams, which are more temperate, come
from temperate rainforests, like a little bit a few degrees
up in latitude, so like in northern Vietnam, you'll find
sewellia and cloud forests, which are these almost like southern
South America, very misty mountains orchids, really heavy like beard
mosses and giant boulders now rather than jungle creeks, so
really big granite boulders which are kind of the leftover
from the continent getting battered with rising tides and sinking
and rising and then more temperates rivers. So in China,
some of the hillstream loaches will actually be able to
tolerate down into the mid bodies. And these would be
ideal pond and let's say, outdoor hillstream fish for us
in the southern United States. I think they'd make fabulous
additions to garden ponds, great ornamental fish load to reproduce
though a pair will maybe give you twenty babies every
three months, so they couldn't be invasive. They like to
be in the sun, so they're always out and about Why.
Speaker 2: Don't you since you've kind of mentioned a couple of
the different groups, and can you maybe for the listeners
sort of describe kind of what they look like. And yeah,
a little bit of the differences maybe between the two
major families and then the family I know you kind
of like a little more.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So broadly, hillstream loaches, they're what I call true
hillstream loaches, which are gastromizon to day, and then lizard
or witpale hillstream loaches which are ballatori day and these
are nocturnal ballatori day or heavily scaled nocturnal almost micropredators
that live in riffles more in headwaters. So they're very
oxygen dependent and they're more a little primitive. They seem
like a little more like ancestor fish or like earlier
genre than what I'm interested in, which are gastromized on
a day or hillstream true hillstream loaches and true hillstream
loaches come from a bunch of different families. And again
they're from a few land masses, and you can tell
them apart based on which land mass they come from.
So the borneo hillstream loaches have these outrageous tropical patterns
like you would see on rainbow fish, almost so aritifhores,
which are like capturing reflective cells which give them more
of a radiant light rather than true pigment, so they
sparkle under high high light, which is what they like.
So if you ever see these fish in the wild,
they're in the sun, and these like crystal clear jungle creeks,
and they sparkle like living diamonds almost, and they graze
like cattle, and they talk to each other, which is amazing.
All families are able to click jaws and grasp on
diminished swind bladders, so although it's inaudible to us, fish
are able to make their own sounds, and so moving
up to the more commonly known loaches from gastromized on it,
they would be like your reticulated hillstream loaches, and the
other Suellia like Suellia sp spotted which has now been
described as Swellia hype sick crotea, and those are more
like the they call them ufo shaped or sting gray
shaped hillstream loaches. And then as you go more northward
you'll find that those ufo shaped hillstream loaches begin to
bleed into what I call and hillstream loaches, which are
more colorful. They like almost salamander looking hillstream loaches, and
those can be split into a few lineages. The Chinese
ones are my favorite, specifically the sale thin hillstream loaches,
and those are pseudo gastromiazon and labby gastromiaz On. Their
common names would be the purple thin hillstream loach would
be one that most people would know, pseudo Gastromizon ladysps.
One of the goals of our import house is to
bring every species and every location of it and establish
it in the United States and either a home aquarium,
a garden center, a nature preserve, or a home pond,
what have you. I think they're that special that they
need to be protected, and I worry for them as
Asia develops that they could be lost.
Speaker 2: And I think one of the things you had kind
of mentioned before, their kind of anatomy is a little
interesting relative to some of the other species. Can you
maybe talk about their anatomy and their finaged differences.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the hillstream loaches, rather than like
your traditional sucker fish, which just have its mouth part
adapted to being a suction plate, polstrimog is entire underside.
So it's like from their mouth all the way down
to their eurogenital region is their section plate. And they're
able to articulate every fin ray and their pectoral and
pelvic fin so thinking of them as like arms and legs,
they can articulate them like fingers essentially. And another thing
about them is they have these calcified nodules four to
seven on each pectoral and pelvic fin, almost like the
formation of Like I don't know, you're a veterinarian, maybe
you could tell me this of if cartilage is a
precursor to bone materialming an evolution. Ye, so it's almost
like they're developing new bone structures within their fins. And
the higher in elevation you go, you then get to
see this suction plate get lost and the fish almost
begin to gain like a new more f ology and
like van Menena, which I call shark suckers, and they
actually stand up and like sculpins, will walk on all
four limbs. And one can't help but tie in this
ecosystem of going higher and higher up in elevation as
a decrease in H two zero in an increase of air,
and the fish are kind of adapting to it. So
I kind of have always been perplexed by this conundrum
as Okay, the fish are adapting to moving in like
almost like a fresh water tide pool, which is tied
going up and down in these ever changing kill streams
through wet and dry seasons so they've adapted this complete
underside suction plate to crawl up rocks. They're tough as
nails essentially, so counterintuitively, they can last for like a
week or two in and then like a large enough
body of water without water movement because they're loaches. Loaches
are pretty tough, and then they'll kind of like wait
until the rain hits again, and then they'll move back
to a stream and then they'll they actually will be
fry sometimes in these like stagnant water bodies which are
like ools, and so these are very mobile fish. And
then as you get higher where they get to more
of like these steady mountain springs where it's like the
water levels only a few centimeters, this bizarre newt morphology
begins to emerge, and then you find them cohabitating with
like true nuts, like the blue tailed spine ups fire
bellied newts in Asia. So you'll find as you go high,
high up in elevation that you get your arrived to
a point where what I call like the shark suckers
that are like balamand they almost look like salamander hills,
trum loaches meet true newts and one thinks like, oh
my god, is this It is this the missing link?
Is this the jump between water vertebrates and land vertebrates,
And it's just been here the whole time and we
just haven't made the jump. And so here in America
we actually have some crevice dwelling salamanders that only exist
in headwaters, like the green salamander from the place the
Dante groupings, and they are dependent on trickles of spring
water keeping their eggs wet. And they're lungless. All of
our salamanders here, lungless salamanders. I just think it's the
coolest thing. I think all these dots need to be connected,
and someone's so close. I hope they come soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like, yeah, that is interesting, whether it's
convergent or whether it's actually like relate you know. Yeah,
that's yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about aquariums and tank setups. Now,
my first question for you is are these a good
beginner fish or are they going to be more for
advanced hobbyists.
Speaker 5: Oh. No, they're perfect for beginners. So they're actually pretty
economical too. They don't require a heater. All they require is,
let's say, a hearty bubble, so they can't lose oxygen
for more than let's say thirty six hours, because that's
the time window I give them for being a perishable
good in transit, and so in the home aquarium in
high density it's about that too, a planet well dense aquarium.
All they require is an air pump. They like natural
fluctuation and temperature throughout the day, like say like a
like almost like a like a salamander or your amphibians
that are about room temperature. They keep an a terrarium.
You don't require heat. They do require bright light though,
and so I do suggest keeping like a grow light
on their aquarium to get a nice biofilm to grow.
And so they're grazing fish. It's not that they're not
beginner friendly, it's people jump the gun on getting them,
and they have immature aquariums. And the most critical part
is that you have what I call is like a
general substrate layer that they can accept as being. They
utilize substrate for their reproduction. In general foraging, they will
like plucos and corridoras, filter sam through their little gill
plates and pick out edible particles in addition to grazing,
So that substrate layer needs to mature with microfauna, so
coca pods and then ideally like microworms to trytis worms,
what have you. And the bright light creates algae, and
the algae plus these microfauna give us something called offlocks,
which is its own little microse and it's like a
living algae wafer essentially, kind.
Speaker 2: Of like the yeah what the a lot of the
African ciglids, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I could the raspers from the Tanganikan Haganiquan
sicklids will rasp on hair algae that's also bonded to
endemic microfon and get their full nutritional profile that way.
So the whole strem just have these itty bitty little
mouths because they're always sorting through these bits of natural
algae wafers off wos, let's just call it slime coat.
And then they'll filter pieces of sand and kind of
pop the little grains of sand out through their gills
and then they're like, oh, I found the worm. And
so what people miss is that you really need to
let your aquarium mature. So it's almost like an aquatic
terrarium we're making for them. We're going to have a
sandy gravelly substrate. I really like to use smooth ocean
stones rather than let's say, like traditional aquarium substrate or
traditional hardscape you can buy. I find the smoother the surface,
the happier they are, and the more consistent the algae
profile is. So I use a combination of unglazed terra
cotta pots for them to hang on to, which is
also great for anaerobic bacteria to colonize inside of almost
functions like a giant ceramic crean, and I fill it
up with again, I fill it up with that sandy
gravelly substrate and maybe lay a few smooth little pebbles
on top, because de loches for enrichment. They just love
digging around in it. And as soon as your tank
matures and you're ready for them, the dump them in.
Speaker 2: You just get this show.
Speaker 5: And Yeah, I think that they're perfectly beginner friendly. It's
just people jump the gun on getting them. They see them,
they want them. They're the coolest newest thing right now
on the hobby, which sadly kind of leads to a
lot of death in this industry. Is people just don't know.
So if we can dispel them here together today, I
think that you know we're onto something cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it sounds good, So I guess just to
kind of clarify, and you know, obviously main kind of
room temp versus like Florida room temp. Although obviously we
have ac down here. Yeah yeahh Like when you say temperatures,
I guess you said some can take it really cold,
but in general a lot of them can handle sixty
to eighty ish. I mean obviously not that huge flux
in one time, but we'll see. So I would say,
like the hard boundary would be sixty sixty for the minimum,
eighty five for the maximum. Ok So all genre, all
genre be able to exist in that. So like kind
of like your bedroom temperature. No one's going to sleep
in a ninety degree bedroom, you know, So like that's
kind of what I call them as like a bedroom display.
I love.
Speaker 5: I used to have this long, twenty gallon in here,
and it had pseudogastromias On fasciatus and vegiang, which are
my absolute favorite species and location of Hellstream lonch And sadly,
you know, they weren't mine because they were the businesses
and they were for sale, and they got got sold off.
I got sold and so they had to go. And
then the tank went because then the pest nail. I
don't look at a tank full of pest nail, so
you know they got so. But yeah, their bedroom fish essentially,
or an unheated fishroom. So some people like to, like,
you know, have like a fish room that they keep
like always like high seventies, high eighties, if they keep
discus or plucos to keep them breeding.
Speaker 2: Not like that.
Speaker 5: Hillstream locusts are going to be their own thing. It's
going to be an unheated, no un heated fishroom. But
along with that kind of a whole new profile of
fish that absolutely love that temperature range as well, And
we can discuss those if you want to, either now
or later. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Actually, a couple of more quick things with regard to
water quality. I think I'm assuming you know same deal.
You don't want any ammonia nitrite and uh now you
had mentioned something about common water changes often, is that right?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, So actually there are some quirks to
this species. It's kind of like a new habit that
you're going to have to get into if you want
to be a hill They're starting to call themselves hilly
hobbyists h I L l I or h I l
L I E. Is what they're calling themselves on Facebook. Now,
these are people that are just kind of like generally
finding out the best practices for these even though like
I've given them the best, my best information, it seems
like people are kind of always innovating in the in
the bobby, and so for water changes, it does look
like if you want to get them to always be
in production, they're receptive to having a cool water change
every once in a while to activate their breeding. So again,
if you are kind of lazy on water changes, you
want to have them in a more densely planeted aquarium
when you're doing your water changes. This is something that's
very critical about a breeding colony, which I need to
say here. The loaches utilize their substrate as where they
lay their eggs. Some will use elongated tail, their elongated
tails like the mainland China geniuses which I really love
the sales and Pillstream loaches will use their long tail
to clear out a burrow where they'll adhere some eggs
to the bottom surface of the rock and then brush
it shut. Or some will literally they'll do a mating
dance in the water column in a massive event, will
release their eggs and milk, or they will just be
egg scatterers. They will brush up against a rock surface
or plant or again just in a little ditch in
the substrate and deposit eggs and milk. So you cannot
vacuum your substrate with these fish at all. You cannot.
You will lose fry out the window if you do so.
Although it seems kind of counterintuitive, you have to have
like moulm piles building up in the corner. And the
babies are dependent on eating their parents species to get
their bacteria profile. That digest a lot of let's say
heavy plant matter that they encounter as grazers, and so
this is actually something across most grazing animals. You'll see
that animals that have high cellulose intake require specialized bacteria
from their parents. So in overly clean tanks, people are
learning that the babies just kind of wilt, they diminish
into these little, like thickly thin things, and then they die.
And then tanks that are constantly pumped through with antibiotics
actually also have this effect on the fry to so
you kind of I want to quarantine them to theses.
You'll just want to do parasite treatment with them, and
then for a broad spectrum antibiotic. If I see them,
like with a lesion that I'm worried about getting infected
due to sharp substrate, I use doxycyclin. I think that's
just a good broad spectrum topical internal external. You also
do use like the nitro pizone canamies and combo et cetera.
But don't like be constantly pumping antibiotics dirty fish. Like,
after you get them clean, get them into a well planted,
gravelly substrated sandy aquarium with smooth stones, and then stay
up on cool water changes. I'd say daily for the
gastrom iazon for three days if you want to get
them to breed, and then for all of their genre
it would just be bi monthly or weekly if you're
feeding heavily, based on how heavy you feed them. So okay,
pretty friendly, Pretty friendly in terms of husbandry, it's just
you know, like I do like five fahrenheit degree cooler
with the gastromiazon to trick them into thinking it rained
and actually tap water. It being a different pH will
also trick them into being like, oh, it's rainy season.
Speaker 2: For the more.
Speaker 5: Tropical equatorial species. The more northern species like Ciwellia mainland
China genuses will breed uninterrupted as soon as their comfy
and or given like a cool water change to jump
start them.
Speaker 2: Okay, so yeah, I guess one more quick question and
then we're going to have to wrap it up. I'll
definitely have you on again and we'll talk about some
of the other species that can go with them. But
I guess in terms of like numbers and you know,
social slash aggression, like what are your thoughts on that
for people that want to get these?
Speaker 5: Okay, so these are amazing, you can have. What I
like to do is I pick a colorful species from
each genre.
Speaker 2: So I pick.
Speaker 5: Let me talk about stalking first before I jump the gun,
and I get people all excited about going out and
buying these stocking The more the merrier. But with the
more you have, the more you have to stay up
on the husbandry of the aquarium or have it be
automated plan which is something people are starting to cry
to see with their fish rooms, which is what minus.
So I kind of feel heavy, and you know, I
have dense stockings.
Speaker 2: So in a.
Speaker 5: Twenty long I would say you could have sixty loaches
from twenty from three separate genres. That you could have
twenty Thuellia from one species, so twenty I would pick twenty.
For a beginner, I'd do twenty Swellia linio lata in
a twenty long first, let it mature. Then I would
add twenty borneo suckers, and then I would add twenty
pseudogastromized on probably the Meyer's hillstream loach, your chenny, and
these would be good intro hillstream loaches for people. And
you can see how they all interact, and you'll see
that they are incredibly social and their aggression level is minimal.
They have these little downward facing mouths, so they can't
nip anyone to death like your stone loaches do. I
do love botillas, I do love your shasteriloches, but they
are not community fish. They will suck down anything that
has shiny eyes'll inhale it out of their little skulls
or invert britz or quick lunch. The hillstream loaches are
invert friendly, and their little jaws are so weak they
can't pop other fish's eggs or their own, so they're
frying egg safe. And you'll see that they enter into
this bizarre little talk with each other in the most
bright let's say, flat surface in your aquarium, whether it's
a plane of glass, a flat rock in a place
of flow that it's especially bright light, or the inside
of a flower pot sitting up right. They really like that,
and they all kind of congregate every once in a
while and they enter into these like dominance displays, and
then they disperse back to their own little sub territories.
So they're very social fish, and they require the company
of others, and it doesn't have to be from their
own species. It can be from another genre. So you'll
see people kind of keep like a little specimeny type aquariums,
which I don't like. I think that they're so important
to have breeding here because they're so delicate for international export.
Like they have that thirty six hour perishable good window.
So if your system or they're in a bag for
thirty six hours, I think past that you're going to
run into health. Fish is like they begin to die
get high d away, So if they make it here,
it's important to establish them. So I think they're critical
to getting on a lot of the Florida farms and
Texas farms in addition to some of the rainbow fish
and rice fish we'll talk about in another episode.
Speaker 2: But yeah, now that sounds good. Yeah, colorful community fish. Yeah,
we'll definitely talk more in another interview, but unfortunately we
are out of time. I did want to thank you
Sam and our producer Mark Winner for making the show possible. Sam,
do you give any real quick words of wisdom, final
thoughts and we'll get more of your thoughts in another interview.
Speaker 5: I would just say, keep those aquariums mature before you
get the fish, buy them from a reputable breeder. So
rather than spend twelve dollars for a sickly borneo sucker
at your local fish store that just popped in, and
I'd look for a breeder or a repuable importer like me.
Marcel's fish is also really good. He breeds a lot
of really great sowell. Ya. There's a band called Roseline
Seventeen's Hillstream Loaches where you can buy some o the rare.
Well ya, if you get into those and think you
starting to breed some of the fish, I saw them
so hideworm. I clean all my fish, so I'm also
a repuable placed. I'd also recommend dance fish in what
spot and then if Imperial Tropicals ever has them in
they're also good too. Oh okay, yeah, sounds good. Hillstream
Kingdom dot com and I have a new shipment coming
in at the beginning of August and there'll be some
very colorful, uh pretty rare China fish in that, so
I'm going to have those Sejiang fish back.
Speaker 2: Well. Thanks. Please be sure to check out Sam's weblinks
we'll have on his Aquarium Innia episode guest page. If
you have any questions, comments, or ideas for a show,
email me at doctor Roy at petlfe radio dot com.
That's d R R O Y at petlfe radio dot com.
Until next time, please visit your local cram stores and
keep your tanks clean and your fish healthy, and definitely
check out the beautiful Hillstream loaches in cool Fish available
at Pillscream Kingdom's LLC.
Speaker 4: Let's Talk Pets every week on demand only on Petlive
Radios dot com.