New, Intro and my love affair with Botia Kubotai
Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 2:43 am
Hello, my name is Melissa. I have been reading here on and off for the past few years. I finally decided to join up. I live in the USA in Rochester, NY. I currently have a 60 gallon tank and the loach inhabitants are 6 or 7 botia kubotai (its hard to count them as the tank is very heavily planted). Up until the end of June I had worked in a petstore that was mostly a fish store. I managed the fish room for a few years, and worked there for a total of, i think, 6 or 7 years. The store has over 300 fish tanks on the retail floor and about twice that in the back room.
I decided to go back to school (starting soon, in January) so I needed to find a part time job with more flexible scheduling. I had a 75 gallon display tank I set up in the store around 5 years ago with clown loaches, who I miss a lot. The original ones (5 of them) grew from 1" to about 5-6" during that time. The 2nd wave of them (another 5) have been in the tank for 2 years and went from 1" to 3". There are 10 in there, along with 9 rainbow fish. I go back to visit them often.
A few (4 maybe?) years ago we got in a new loach from Myanmar that I fell in love with. It was being sold as a "clouded loach". I purchased 3 only to have them die within days, as did the entire shipment at the store. This hurt as they were $25 a piece at the time. We occasionally got them in and then about two years ago the price dropped dramatically, we were getting them in regularly and I was now the fish room manager. Being the fish room manager gave me more leeway to do what I wanted and I had started deworming all loach shipments, starting 3 days after arrival. I at first used levimisole and then switched to Prazi Pro when we started carrying it. The botia kubotai started surviving. Overall our loaches just started doing better. I purchased 3 more and put them into a 29 gallon tank. Later I purchased 2 more, brining my total up to 5. They shared the tank with 2 angelfish and 3 beckford's pencilfish (which recently died at the age of about 5 years old).
My angels and botias were getting large so I purchased them a 60 US gallon tank. I set it up, moved my filters, plants and gravel over and then the fish. Unfortunately my botias came down with ICH and I lost all but 1 of them. Once the last guy stabilized I decided I needed to get him buddies again. He went from being active and out to hiding all the time. We had gotten a shipment of young ones (about a half an inch long) and I bought 9 of them. I lost a few in quarantine, and now have a total of 6 or 7 botia kubotai. As I said before it is hard to count them because the tank is very heavily planted. This group is now at adult hood, they are all around 2-3 inches and in, or almost in, total adult coloration. These guys are much, much more secretive than my last group. I find it odd since all but 1 of these were purchased as babies, so I would think they would acclimate even better to a captive situation. They just started coming out more and more and I have had them for nearly a year. My original guy is about 4 inches long and the leader of the group. Lately he has been getting challenged by a youngster. Fights between the 2 are happening every few days and lasting up to 15 minutes long. The big always wins and sends the youngster into hiding for a few hours afterwards. Once in awhile fights break out amongst some of the younger ones, but not to frequently.
They feast heavily on a wide variety of things. I feed them frozen blood worms, mysis shrimp, brine shrimp, chopped up krill, mosquito larvae, live grindal worms and brine shrimp. They also get a variety of pellet foods (3 different brands of shrimp pellets and algae wafers along with the tropical fish food of which I have 7 different brands). All the food is replaced every 6 months if it has not been used up. Oddly the botias favorite foods are OSI shrimp pellets and hikari algae wafers. Twice a week I soak the frozen foods in vitamins for 20 minutes prior to feeding.
They share the tank with many fish (it is overstocked) including 2 large angelfish, 4 A. thomasi, 7 harlequin rasboras, 1 betta splendens, 9 otocinclus arnoldi, 1 peckolita sp., 6 Characodon lateralis "Los Berros" + fry and 2 pearl gouramis who are soon to go as they have gotten uncharacteristically aggressive. There are also lots of Malaysian trumpet snails. The botias do not eat these as the shell is very hard. They did eat all of the ramshorn snails. Twice a week I do a 50% water change. I feed the tank once or twice a day and fast them one day a week. Filtration is a fluval 405, which is used strictly for mechanical filtration. It is cleaned once a month. The tank is very heavily planted, no gravel shows, it is all covered with plants. Light is a 110 watt power compact and a regular fluorescent double bright (holds 2 bulbs). I also inject DIY (yeast) CO2. Temp is around 75*f. The slightly lower temperature keeps the angelfish from breeding. If I raise it they try to kill everyone.
Once I have a house I want to try keeping my botia kubotai outdoors in a pond for the summer. I think they will do very well outside while it is warm enough. I would love to have them breed but from what I understand it is very rare to have laoches breed in captivity. Are hillies the only loaches that have been bred in captivity?
Does anyone else here keep botia kubotai? How do you keep them?
Along with my 60 US gallon fish tank (the one described above) I have a 56 US gallon tank housing 2 goldfish, which gets almost daily water changes. I also have a 2 US gallon tank with a pair of A. bitaeniatum "ijebu ode". I also have fry and eggs almost constantly from the killies (the A. bitaeniatum). I also have 2 cats, a box turtle, a hermanns tortoise and am getting a puppy very soon:)
All the tanks have live plants.
Sorry that was so long!
I decided to go back to school (starting soon, in January) so I needed to find a part time job with more flexible scheduling. I had a 75 gallon display tank I set up in the store around 5 years ago with clown loaches, who I miss a lot. The original ones (5 of them) grew from 1" to about 5-6" during that time. The 2nd wave of them (another 5) have been in the tank for 2 years and went from 1" to 3". There are 10 in there, along with 9 rainbow fish. I go back to visit them often.
A few (4 maybe?) years ago we got in a new loach from Myanmar that I fell in love with. It was being sold as a "clouded loach". I purchased 3 only to have them die within days, as did the entire shipment at the store. This hurt as they were $25 a piece at the time. We occasionally got them in and then about two years ago the price dropped dramatically, we were getting them in regularly and I was now the fish room manager. Being the fish room manager gave me more leeway to do what I wanted and I had started deworming all loach shipments, starting 3 days after arrival. I at first used levimisole and then switched to Prazi Pro when we started carrying it. The botia kubotai started surviving. Overall our loaches just started doing better. I purchased 3 more and put them into a 29 gallon tank. Later I purchased 2 more, brining my total up to 5. They shared the tank with 2 angelfish and 3 beckford's pencilfish (which recently died at the age of about 5 years old).
My angels and botias were getting large so I purchased them a 60 US gallon tank. I set it up, moved my filters, plants and gravel over and then the fish. Unfortunately my botias came down with ICH and I lost all but 1 of them. Once the last guy stabilized I decided I needed to get him buddies again. He went from being active and out to hiding all the time. We had gotten a shipment of young ones (about a half an inch long) and I bought 9 of them. I lost a few in quarantine, and now have a total of 6 or 7 botia kubotai. As I said before it is hard to count them because the tank is very heavily planted. This group is now at adult hood, they are all around 2-3 inches and in, or almost in, total adult coloration. These guys are much, much more secretive than my last group. I find it odd since all but 1 of these were purchased as babies, so I would think they would acclimate even better to a captive situation. They just started coming out more and more and I have had them for nearly a year. My original guy is about 4 inches long and the leader of the group. Lately he has been getting challenged by a youngster. Fights between the 2 are happening every few days and lasting up to 15 minutes long. The big always wins and sends the youngster into hiding for a few hours afterwards. Once in awhile fights break out amongst some of the younger ones, but not to frequently.
They feast heavily on a wide variety of things. I feed them frozen blood worms, mysis shrimp, brine shrimp, chopped up krill, mosquito larvae, live grindal worms and brine shrimp. They also get a variety of pellet foods (3 different brands of shrimp pellets and algae wafers along with the tropical fish food of which I have 7 different brands). All the food is replaced every 6 months if it has not been used up. Oddly the botias favorite foods are OSI shrimp pellets and hikari algae wafers. Twice a week I soak the frozen foods in vitamins for 20 minutes prior to feeding.
They share the tank with many fish (it is overstocked) including 2 large angelfish, 4 A. thomasi, 7 harlequin rasboras, 1 betta splendens, 9 otocinclus arnoldi, 1 peckolita sp., 6 Characodon lateralis "Los Berros" + fry and 2 pearl gouramis who are soon to go as they have gotten uncharacteristically aggressive. There are also lots of Malaysian trumpet snails. The botias do not eat these as the shell is very hard. They did eat all of the ramshorn snails. Twice a week I do a 50% water change. I feed the tank once or twice a day and fast them one day a week. Filtration is a fluval 405, which is used strictly for mechanical filtration. It is cleaned once a month. The tank is very heavily planted, no gravel shows, it is all covered with plants. Light is a 110 watt power compact and a regular fluorescent double bright (holds 2 bulbs). I also inject DIY (yeast) CO2. Temp is around 75*f. The slightly lower temperature keeps the angelfish from breeding. If I raise it they try to kill everyone.
Once I have a house I want to try keeping my botia kubotai outdoors in a pond for the summer. I think they will do very well outside while it is warm enough. I would love to have them breed but from what I understand it is very rare to have laoches breed in captivity. Are hillies the only loaches that have been bred in captivity?
Does anyone else here keep botia kubotai? How do you keep them?
Along with my 60 US gallon fish tank (the one described above) I have a 56 US gallon tank housing 2 goldfish, which gets almost daily water changes. I also have a 2 US gallon tank with a pair of A. bitaeniatum "ijebu ode". I also have fry and eggs almost constantly from the killies (the A. bitaeniatum). I also have 2 cats, a box turtle, a hermanns tortoise and am getting a puppy very soon:)
All the tanks have live plants.
Sorry that was so long!
) with 10 Clowns, 3 B. histrionica, a lone B. dario that I adopted and some barbs and Cories.
Mesonoemacheilus triangularis should be added to that list too.
