Halfbeak advice – 03/18/08
Hello!
<Ave!>
About six weeks ago, I found two pairs of halfbeaks at a chain pet store. They were labeled 'Celebes Halfbeaks'. I was surprised to see them there, and asked a clerk to bag them up for me. The clerk made me promise to put them in a brackish tank. I was pretty sure that they were not brackish fish, since I recently finished reading Neale's new book, "Brackish-Water Fishes." (Great book!)
<Thanks!>
But, since they were in brackish water at the store, I put them into a quarantine tank with brackish water.
<Ah, not ideal for most Nomorhamphus species. So far as I know, only Nomorhamphus erhardt lives in brackish water; all the others are soft/acid water beasties. That said, one store near me has a female Nomorhamphus liemi in its display brackish tank and has done so for a long time. So like a lot of "peripheral freshwater fish" (i.e., freshwater fish from marine families) they likely have significant salt tolerance.>
They did fine, grew a little, and time passed and I never got around to acclimating them to fresh water. Last week, I wanted the quarantine tank, so I moved them into one of my brackish display tanks. I noticed at the time that one of the females was quite fat. Just now as I was feeding them, I noticed baby halfbeaks in the tank! They are quite large, about 1 cm or more long. I saw four or five of them, and they
are very lively.
<Indeed they are! And wonderfully easy to rear. The tricky bit is getting the mothers through pregnancy; once the babies are delivered, life gets a lot easier.>
My question is, are these Nomorhamphus liemi? I looked through Baensch's Aquarium Atlas 1 through 3, and they look more like N. liemi than any of the other halfbeaks.
<The give-away is the shape of the beak: Nomorhamphus liemi has a beak that curls, like a little beard, under the jaw.>
My picture doesn't show it well, but the male's pelvic fins are yellow. I want to make sure before I do acclimate them to fresh water. If they are reproducing, they are not exactly unhappy where they are, and I want to keep them happy!
<I'd leave them where they are for now. With halfbeaks, what seems to matter most of all is water chemistry stability, and if adding a little marine salt mix gives them that, I don't think they care all that much.>
Thank you for your time,
<You may care to peruse my "halfbeak breeding diary" at my web site, here:
http://homepage.mac.com/nmonks/aquaria/halfbeakbreeding.html
>
Susan
<Good luck! Neale.>