Killie basics

Killifish can live in small bodies of water, but in wet forests can jump out of the puddle and flip downhill to better water without suffocating.

Don't believe it? Watch this video, killifish in their natural habitat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sy3R3f_GCY

Thus killies can be kept in small tanks, but need clean water, safety, and a tight fitting lid.

When the fish are not being intensively bred, we keep them in 5 or 10 gallon  aquariums. The tank has a box filter with gravel and peat moss, a thermometer, a mop, and a few floating plants. The water is about 2/3rds full, and has a very tight fitting lid. The fish will lay a few eggs every day as long as they are fed well. We change a third of the water twice a week.


To breed them we separate the sexes into side-by side tanks, so they can see their mate. We feed them heavily with live foods for 2-5 days. After the females fill with eggs we  place pairs  in 2 1/2 gallon breeding tanks with an airstone and a nylon mop with a cork for floatation. Again, the water is about 2/3rds full, and has a very tight fitting lid. You can expect more than 10 eggs a day, and most will be fertile. When the female's belly flattens or she has bite marks on her fins, remove her immediately.We put her back in her isolation tank which is heavily planted.

In the watercolor above, the male A. E. Dageti chases the female. Note her ragged tail fin.


Label a dish and lid  to receive the eggs and take the mop out. Let the excess water drain, don't squeeze it.

Dad is past retirement age and needs strong reading glasses, left, to see the eggs. These may be purchased for a few dollars at Walmart. They are strength +2.5.

The mop is synthetic  "Acrylic" or Nylon yarn wrapped around a book. Th book is the size of the depth of the water, plus one inch.  Once you have enough wraps, then tie the strands at one end, cut at the other, and finally tie the mop to a cork with a groove cut around the center. We label  cork with the species name to identify the mop.

Gently survey the surface of the mop and then systematically search the interior for eggs.

Above an A. Epiplatys dageti egg is near the curved tip of the eyedropper

Gently pick the egg up with very clean fingers, with no soap or anything else on them.

Then drop it in the water. I use aged aquarium water in petri dishes with partitions. Some add a little Methylene Blue or Salt to discourage fungus.


Here is a video of the process.

We place the eggs in labeled covered petri dishes on a dark shelf. The

camera flash makes the shelves seem bright, but usually they are in the shade.

Toothpicks hold the upper lid open a little for air. When the embryos darken you can see the fish in the egg with a magnifying glass; at that point the ripe eggs are trasfered to 1" of water in pyrex bowls

Once they hatch we place them in a clean tank (above left) and add infusoria,

then newly hatched brine shrimp when they seem large enough (right). Notice that the water is left shallow for the smallest fry on the left.

Above left and center is the brine shrimp station, right are Daphnia.

For brine shrimp  put 3 Tablespoons of  Sea Salt per gallon of water, then add about 1/2 teaspoon of brine shrimp "eggs". We do this in the center jug, which sits on a rubber terrarium heating pad. After 24 hours  transfer the mix of nauplii and shells  to the inverted bottle, with its bottom cut off. We place it in a coffee pot to hold it, as shown. You can also use a 2 liter soda bottle; Cut off the base, put the shrimp in the inverted top, use the cut off base as a stand.

To collect the newly hatched shrimp remove the aeration and shine a light on the neck. In ours we covered all but the neck with tape. The brine shrimp naplii are attracted to the light at the neck of the inverted bottle, the only part not darkened by tape. A turkey baster removes the shrimp, and these are squirted into a very fine "brine shrimp net", then dipped into fresh tank water and fed.

As the babies grow  raise the water level (tight lid!) and add fine powdered dried food and  vinegar eels.

At 1/2 inch of length, transfer them to a 10 gallon tank for growing out, about 10 fish to a tank.

When they can be sexed, match individuals with the opposite gender, making up  pairs who are not sibings . This avoids inbreeding. This tank pictured above contains 8 Aphyosemion primagenium, one of our conservation projects.


Here is a watercolor of the A. primagenium male.

The stick got up and slowly walked away

We see a lot of venomous snakes in the field. Think of it as an occupational hazard.

A Red Spitting Cobra at Lothagam, Kenya

What follows is a favorite  story I tell to my family and friends. They cannot disbelieve me, because Susan was there and never stretches a story. It's called "The stick got up and slowly walked away". This is the short version:

On the way to Kenya for field  work we stopped at the British Museum of Natural History to examine fossils from India. Humphry Greenwood, the curator of the fish collection, heard where we were going and asked us to check a Nothobranchius locality well north of Malindi, near Lamu.

In Kenya we borrowed one of Princeton's Toyota Land Cruisers, and a seine net, for the trip. We obtained a permit from the Kenya Fish and Game Department (now Fisheries)  for "Scientific collection of freshwater fishes", demanding all specimens to be deposited with the Kenya National Museum. This works; since museums routinely loan research specimens to other museums, the British Museum folks would have easy access to the specimens.

The first night we camped in Tsavo National Park, because the night was so dark that I nearly hit a Zebra on the road. In camp our sleep was interrupted twice. First when the night passenger train  to Mombasa passed nearby. Steam locomotives are loud!

Then about 2 am a herd of Elephants walked through our camp. We sleep in the covered truck bed , so there was no danger of being stepped on, but they startled us. We could hear their breathy wheeze, "Whee-uw! Whee-uw!"
 In the morning there were huge piles of Elephant dung around as we made our breakfast. We broke camp about 7 and continued toward the coast.

At noon we stopped at a small duka and bought great Samosas and cold Tusker beer for  lunch. We drove into  Mombasa, then turned North along the coast road for Malindi. We stopped at dusk at a beautiful beach campsite north of Malindi. Many dutch hippies were in attendance; they were much disliked by the staff because they never bought anything or tipped. They were glad to see "rich americans" for a change.

A temporary pond, a "pan" has formed along a low spot in the road. This pan was full of hundreds of  killifish related to Nothobrachius guentheri, shown below.

The next day we left  for the northeast coast, where we collected and preserved  Nothobranchius from coastal pans. On the way we passed through several police checkpoints. Late in the day, at a pan on the edge of the coastal forest, Susan refused to get out of the truck to help seine. I had overlooked ten elephants at the edge of the trees, waiting patiently in the forest shadows for us to leave. They wanted their evening drink. I coaxed her out, leaving the doors open and the truck running. The elephants waited for us to finish, then went down for their drink.

A dusk we arrived at the little village that was our destination. Dull kerosene lanterns were lit in the dukas. We turned South to follow our directions to the locality of interest, but the road ahead was covered by thick mud; people walking were knee deep. I asked, in my newly learned Swahili, if we could drive to the intended area. A man said no, the bridge was out.

My map suggested a go-around, so we headed East instead. Soon we came to cleared land and artificial dikes, a bad sign. The locality, I feared, was destroyed. Two men were walking along the dike, and I asked if there were fish in the water. They said there had been "Samaki kidogo" , little fish, when they were young, but didn't know if any were left. 

At the appointed location I stopped and turned the headlights on to illuminate the water. We walked with our net down the incline on the flanks of a big concrete culvert, and into a shallow channel. We found no fish of any kind.  I've always thought that pesticides killed everything in the water. In disgust I led us back to the dike through tall grass. We walked back to the truck and I began to take notes.

In our headlights Susan noticed something in the road. Where we had just emerged from the tall grass she pointed to a long object and said "Chuck, there is a big snake in the road". I glanced up from my notes and replied "That's a stick". Susan said, "Well, the stick is crawling away". It was a big Puff Adder. I opened  the glove box, and said "That's all right, we have Puff Adder antivenom". Just then the two men caught up with us. I cautioned them that a Puff Adder had just entered the tall grass on the side where they were walking. One replied "There are no snakes here."

We never found any Nothobranchius in that spot, and so we made our way back to Malindi on the dirt highway. On the way the soldiers at one of the police checkpoints made us empty the contents of our truck at gunpoint. I became angry (I'm a Marine NCO), and Susan tried to quietly remind me of their rifles. Finally they explained  that they thought we were ivory poachers. We were left to reload our truck without help.

As we drove back we saw several pythons on the road, and arrived at our beach campsite very late. Tired, we threw our low cots onto the beach sand and slept to the sounds of palm tree leaves rustling in the breeze.The next morning a fee collector shook us awake. He looked horrified and asked "Did you sleep in the open, on the ground?" We said we had, and he explained that Black Mambas come down from the trees every night to hunt. I guess we should have read the brochure.

That afternoon we telephoned our colleagues in Nairobi, and learned that a ring of thieves had stolen the other Princeton truck. By taking this side trip to the coast for the BM(NH), we had saved the expedition a great deal of money.

Notice: All of these posts and photos are copyrighted, with all rights reserved. Hundreds of friends and relations have seen them elsewhere for years. Don't even think about using them.

How we got started with Killifish

Hello. I'm a geologist. My wife is a plant specialist.

Many years ago, from the early 70's to the 80's, my wife and I worked in Africa. While passing through London, an ichthyologist at the British Museum, Humphry Greenwood, asked us to look for species of killifish whose status was poorly known. We knew something about them thanks to a local aquarist, Rosario LaCorte. We collected fish  over several years as we traveled around for our research, and back in the states kept a few pairs of related species from all over Africa.

                                      A species of Nothobranchius collected by us from south of Lamu, Kenya

Many of these killifish live in temporary pools,  and the adults die when the water dries up. The next generation rests as eggs in the mud, and hatch when the rains return. This gives them the name "annual fishes". Above are some annual killies from elephant pans in coastal Kenya, north of Malindi.

                                                 Susan taking photographs in Kenya National Museum.

Industrialization of parts of  Africa, and the clearing of forests for their hardwoods and for agriculture, have sent many species  to the verge of extinction.

For example, this is, or was, the Karura Forest near Nairobi in Kenya in 1972. Today it is gone, felled for its hardwoods. A reforestation effort is under way, but it will take about 200 years to restore the forest. By that time, many animal species that depended on the forests will become extinct. Meanwhile Kenya faces terrible droughts, because they have removed the large trees that tap the groundwater and return moisture to the atmosphere above them.

Lately I've started to keep a few killifish species again. I have a light teaching schedule as retirement looms. I've rejoined an aquarium club that preserves them, selected a few species to keep, and filled a small room in the basement with aquaria. There is a lot to relearn, and keeping these colorful fish is very labor labor intensive. Just the thing for an old professor.


At present we keep fish from West Africa: Aphyosemion australe "the golden lyretail" from Gabon, Fundulosoma gardneri  from Makurdi in Nigeria, Aplocheilus (Epiplatys) dageti, and Aphyosemion primagenium. The first three are commonly kept, the latter is my preservation project.

A trip today to the fish room resulted in pictures of the first two species.

Above is a photo of a male Fundulosoma gardeneri from Makurdi, Nigeria.

He is looking at his reflection.

and here is a pair of Aphyosemion australe, the xanthic form.

The female in the foreground is less colorful.

In each tank there are a few floating plants, a box filter, and a yarn mop for collecting eggs.

Here is a  rough video of the fish we keep.

Notice: All of these posts and photos are copyrighted, with all rights reserved. Hundreds of friends and relations have seen the Africa photos and heard the stories, and read published versions of them on other sites.