MEET AN AQUARIST SERIES: JAMAICA By Howard Norfolk I went to Jamaica in winter 2003/4. After celebrating Christmas in the north coast tourist resort areas of Nigril and Montego Bay, I travelled (in taxis) around the entire island with a friend, and met some aquarists on the way. All of them said that when I got to the capital city of Kingston I should see Noel Swaby. I dropped in unannounced one morning at Noel's store, "Swaby's, The Pet Centre," located in a mixed residential/commercial suburb of New Kingston. Noel's wife said that Noel had already left to work at his fish breeding farm, but he would be at the store the next morning if I came before 10 a.m. Meanwhile it was O.K. for me to look around and take some photos.
CLICK ON THUMBNAILS FOR ENLARGEMENTS, THEN GO "BACK." The shop is in what was once the front garden of the Swaby's house. It is a barn-like building with a tin roof, and it definitely would not win any beauty contests!
The tanks were big, and held lots of of all the common aquarium fish, such as livebearers, goldfish and koi, tetras, danios, African and New World cichlids, gouramis and bettas, catfishes, and rainbowfishes. There were also some less common fish. Perhaps because they are more photogenic, the New World cichlids particularly caught my eye:
...I spent the afternoon looking around the sights that Kingston has to offer, and also met and had a nice chat with another aquarist, Norman Dawson. Norman started fish breeding as a hobby but has turned it into a business, specialising mainly in rainbowfishes and African cichlids. His wife has contacts in Canada, and he exports fish to two different Big-Al's stores in Ontario. Unfortunately his farm was some way out of Kingston on a road I had already travelled, so I did not see it. One of Kingston's major attractions is the Bob Marley Museum. Reggae singer Bob Marley remains a folk hero in Jamaica, and the museum is a shrine to his memory, tended by a group of old time hippie-type followers who wear their hair in dreadlocks and who I'm sure smoke lots of 'ganja.'
When Bob sang "Island in the Sun," was he thinking what a paradise Jamaica is for tropical fish breeders??...If so, he was right, because the average temperature is 80-85F (28-30C), and the low in January is 75F (23C). This means that tropical fish can be kept and bred year round, inside or outside, without added heat. (A few species, such as discus and angelfish, slow down in the "cold" month of January. Breeders either accept this, or add heat for a short period for breeding or raising fry). Noel Swaby certainly finds his home a paradise for breeding fish, as he showed me when I visited the next morning.
The large garden all around Noel's house is completely devoted to fish. There are hundreds and hundreds of glass tanks, cement tanks and sunken ponds. Noel has added more and more rows of tanks over the years, and they are now housed in five or six interconnected barn-like structures. There are also some zones where the tanks and ponds are uncovered and open to the elements. It all started as a hobby for Noel, but his operation has become bigger and bigger, and now employs twenty people. The hundreds of tanks I saw surrounding his house are not the end of the story. The home operation is mostly used just for spawning fish. Once they hatch, Noel takes the fish to a 16 acre farm in the nearby hills to grow them out to a saleable size. On the farm he has 500 large plastic drum ponds, and he breeds even more fish there, including African cichlids.
As Noel showed me room upon room of tanks and ponds, which must number in the thousands, I quite lost track of where I was in the maze. And don't forget he also has a 16 acre farm with more tanks and 500 tubs, where he breeds more fish and grows-out the ones bred here! In fact the farm is where he spends most of his time nowadays. Noel sells fish in his own shop, and wholesales them to other stores in Jamaica. But the Yellow Pages of Jamaica lists only eight "Pet Shops" (there are a few more that are unlisted), so clearly Noel breeds more fish than Jamaica's 2.6 million people will ever buy. Noel realises this, and has just (November 2003) started exporting some fish to Florida. He wants to find out which species are most in demand, and at what prices, so he can concentrate his efforts more effectively. Noel is an aquarist whose hobby has grown bigger than that of anyone else I have yet met. Let's wish him success in the future! Noel Swaby is not on the Internet. |
