Maintenance program

[MarZissimo]

Hello everyone, i'm Marco and i'm 28 years old. You know me as Santissimo Savonarola on Facebook and as Marco Marsili (my real full name) on IGL forum.

First of all i want to apologize for my poor English...i do quite well in reading and listening, but speaking English it's not my best quality, so...i'm sorry.

If it doesn't bother you, we would like to ask what you think about a very important project that we are about to begin and that i'm going do describe right now.

We are a very young association and, generally speaking, Italian fish-keeping culture is really ground-zero-like, in terms of species conservation, live food, ethics and so on.
Because of this we are trying to put the basis for something good (for now) and big (in the future).
The world of not selected labyrinth fishes is, allow me to use the term, a "giant mess", because many fish-keepers do not know or do not care about location codes, because many of them use to produce hybrid in order to make money with new fancy form/colors...meanwhile biotopes fall down due to urbanization, pollution, global warming, and so on.
Our idea, but you have been a great inspiration to us doing already a great job with this kind of problems, is trying to reduce this confusion concerning location codes and species, and most important, to put the basis for a maintenance program that in a bad future could be useful to do something like "releasing trip" or just not to lose certain species or population.

I know it's quite an utopia, but as i said earlier we want to do something to improve this situation....and put the basis for something that maybe will become "great". Personally i do think that this kind of project need quality to survive, at any level of development.

That said, the first and most important question is: what do you think about this kind of project? you have more experience compared to us, so which type of precautions/arrangements do you suggest to us, to keep in mind, going through this project?

It's been an hard day...now i need to sleep, but tomorrow i will explain something more, in a more detailed way.

Thanks,
good night, Marco.

[verdeblu]

I am Eugenio. Marco has been working hard to lay the foundations of the maintenance program. We have been discussing several issues that we will brainstorm later here. Besides the general idea the technicalities that we have been trying to address are apparently simple but in reality quite challenging. Among these 1) who should we admit to the program and at which conditions; 2) the located fish vs the  aquarium strains: what should include in the program? 3) how can we make a common European program with similar rules and an efficient database with breeders, exchange programs, etc; 4) how should we decide the new species to include in the program? 5) how should we improve the nomenclature and the traceability of the strains (ideally with year of capture in nature, GPS location, name of the  person who isolated the specimen, substrains etc.).

These are just few themes on which we would like to have some inputs from you and on the basis of which we would like to build our collaboration.

Enjoy the discussion

[MarZissimo]

We've been through several issues since when we figured out that we want a maintenance program...but the most difficult to overcome was (and is still now) the managing of high number of fishes.
 As i said yesterday in Italy we lack ethics and very few people know how to keep endangered species and understand the meaning of maintenance program. This, added to the fact that Betta (and also the other labyrinth fishes) are very easy to breed and spawn with hundred of tiny fries, leads to the problem: "what to do with so many fishes?"
As you surely know keeping 10 specimens or keeping 100 is not the same, also in order to maintain a good and healthy fishes which is the basis for any maintenance program.

How do you manage this issue?

The main problem is that, at least now, we are too few people (about 15). We also have been trying, since when Roberto and Eugenio founded AIB, to educate people through conferences, dedicated events, and of course our forum, but people who wants a single fancy betta male to keep in small aquarium (or even a glass jar) are always more than the one who can do well in a maintenance program.
At first glance our solution was to keep fishes in colony, that is to keep many specimens of the same species/location in a large mono-specific tank, so they can breed as they want and only the best fries can survive and grown up. This solved only partially the problem, because not all Betta species prey their fires, so we must figure out something better.
It would be great for us to participate at European events sharing and exchanging our fishes, in order to get new species without making new import from natural biotopes and give to other hobbyists the result of our breeding project.

To make the problem more understandable i tell you what is happened about giving the fishes to anyone who asks for them.
We imported in 2010 a couple of Betta unimaculata "Mahakam" (that later proved to be Betta cf unimaculata "Melak, Mahakam river system", or at least that's what other hobbyists think about them) and now we have a small and stable colony in Italy thanks to many AIB associated who keep them. Due to the overcrowding problem discussed earlier one of them sell a bunch of juveniles to a certain guy.
A few months later, through another big Italian forum concerning fishes i came to know that those fishes were kept in a 50l tank with fancy endler, ph 8, exaggerated lighting, always and only feed with "tetra min scales", etc...
This, in a situation like ours, with very few specimens in the country, is a tragedy, because in very few years it could lead to a very worse situation with unhealthy fishes and the need to re-import new specimens from Borneo....that's exactly the contrary of what we want to do.
  Making clearer the concept...we would have fishes like the one at 0:06:
[video=youtube;RIso4hbB_nE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIso4hbB_nE[/video]

Now i have to return to work or i get fired :°D

Have a nice day, Marco

[verdeblu]

I hope you were not traumatized by our questions, maybe we can start in an easy way. You could tell us a bit more about the story of the IGL and how you keep track of the breeders, species and which are your policies an values, we can try to do the same