| When Lee and Lisa Newman felt they could finally escape the confines of their one-bedroom apartment last spring, they had one vital specification for their realtor: the house had to have a suitable area in which they could develop a first rate fish room. Such a house they found, on a street hidden away in a suburb of Vancouver Canada, and naturally the first thing they did before considering such mundane tasks as decorating the house or buying furniture was to set up comfortable accommodations for their fish!
Lee is well known as an aquarist in local, national and even international circles, about which more later. He is also the Curator of Tropical Waters at the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre, a large public aquarium and research facility. * * * Lee was born in Bermondsey, London, England, and was taken to Canada (by ship in those days), at the age of three. He grew up in Ontario and his parents were not interested in aquaria. His lifelong passion for fish was sparked when his Grade 1 teacher gave him a female guppy in a one gallon jar. The guppy soon had babies, and "to keep them from fighting" Lee put each baby in a jar of its own which were lined up in rows in the kitchen! Lee soon got his first real tank and then two or three more, in which he kept livebearers, barbs, tetras and catfish. When he was twelve he discovered cichlids on acquiring a pair of rams. He had no luck in breeding them at first, but eventually he learnt enough to accomplish this, and found their behaviour so fascinating that he has been hooked on cichlids ever since. His first fish room was at his parents' house, where he ended up with eleven tanks. Lee's ambition was always to work at a large public aquarium, and to this end he took an aquaculture course at Sir Sandford Fleming College in Ontario. He moved to Vancouver on his own in 1989 and started work as an aquarist in the Cold Saltwater Section of the Vancouver Aquarium. As mentioned earlier, he is now Curator of Tropical Waters, reporting to the Vice-President of Operations. He has a staff of eight, who look after fresh and saltwater tropical fish and the Amazon Gallery. Lee found that to get a job as an aquarist at the Aquarium his college course was important, but just as much so was his keenness and extensive experience as a home hobbyist. He says that volunteering is another way to get a job. Many volunteers are professionals in other fields, but others have a chance of becoming paid staff if that is their goal. Once Lee joined the Aquarium he realised that public aquariums are not just showcases for displaying a lot of pretty fish. They have a deeper purpose, which is to educate people about the aquatic environment and to encourage them to have more care and regard for it. * * * Lee and Lisa met at college, where they were both in the same aquaculture course. Lisa also has a long history of fishkeeping. Her father had several aquariums and gave her a goldfish in a bowl when she was five. She was so upset when it died that her father set up a special livebearer tank just for her, and she has kept up to five mostly community tanks ever since. Lisa followed Lee to Vancouver in 1994, and now works in a pet store. * * * Lee and Lisa's fish room is on the ground floor of their house in what was surely designed to be the "recreation room." I suppose that is what it still is, except that their "recreation" is keeping fish rather than running a bar or playing billiards! The room is freshly painted and has a brand new commercial style carpet. It contains fourteen tanks on sturdy wooden stands which Lee made. The tanks tend to be large: there is a 180 gallon tank, two 90s, a 72, several 40s, and a few smaller ones. The tanks, and the room itself, I found to be spotlessly clean and well maintained. This was not just for the benefit of my photos - when I phoned Lee to visit I suggested that he might need a day or two to clean up his tanks (I'm used to this!) but he said "come over right away - they're always ready." I guess that if you are used to people inspecting your tanks at work every day you carry that attitude home too!
The tanks are filtered with store bought and home made (larger) box filters, powered by a central air system run by a Japanese linear piston air pump which was bought from a wholesaler in New Jersey. Water for water changes is stored in an adjoining utility room, in four 55 gallon plastic barrels. The water is pre-filtered (with a special filter obtained through a hairdresser) to remove copper traces from the house plumbing, and is heated and aerated before being pumped to the tanks when required. The fish room is kept at a temperature of about 22° C, but a few tanks with warmth loving Amazonian fish require auxiliary heaters. Some tanks have their own lighting, particularly the planted ones, but otherwise Lee considers that general room lighting is enough for the fish. The room lights are left on all day, especially in the winter. The unplanted cichlid tanks simply have a thin layer of light-brown silica abrasive landscaping sand on the bottom, and hiding places for the fish are provided by decorative pieces of tree root driftwood which Lee collects from a clean mountain lake. I * * * Lee's main interest has long been South American cichlids. He is currently especially interested in earth eater cichlids, particularly the genus Satanoperca, whose name is Latin for "Satan's perch" , or "demon fish." He likes them because they are gentle and peaceful, unlike their name suggests. Lee is taking a scientific approach to these fish, which he describes as "hoping to contribute behavioural observations in an effort to understand their ecology and assist in taxonomic work." He is also presently keeping cupid cichlids (Biotodoma cupido), and a shoal of hatchet fish which he hopes to breed, something only a few aquarists have done before. He has a permanent culture of daphnia in another tank.
Lisa's fish contribute extra colour to the fish room. She has several tanks of platies and swordtails, a tank of Endler's livebearers (a strain found in Trinidad and brought via California), some West African cichlids, and a tank containing two types of pencilfish and some rasboras. Some of the tanks are planted.
* * * Lee says that his work doesn't give him a huge advantage over the rest of us hobbyists, although he does admit that the Aquarium deals with wholesalers all over North America and the World, and he is occasionally able to add in a private order for fish that tempt him when he is buying for the Aquarium! The Aquarium also has a huge library which he finds useful, and in the course of his work he makes contact with many other expert aquarists. The Aquarium has sent him overseas in connection with the conservation work it sponsors. In 1996 he went to Brazil to work with Project Piaba in the Manaus area, and in the same year he went to Uganda to work with Lake Victoria cichlids. He collected rare fish for both the Aquarium and himself. He has also made two private collecting trips to Peru: in 1993 with a group of colleagues from the Aquarium, and in 1998 with an American group. Lee writes about fish. He has had twenty four articles published, in Aquarium Fish magazine, Cichlid News, Buntbarsch Bulletin, Aquarium Frontiers, and Acara. He is also an accomplished photographer and there are framed photographs of fish on the walls of his house. He won a photographic award at the 1997 ACA Convention in Chicago. He is a member of the American Cichlid Association and is well respected as one of their speakers. He has been invited to speak to clubs and organisations all over North America, and has a collection of crested presentation mugs to prove it. When I was there my tea was served in a mug from the Ohio Cichlid Association! People whose work involves fish keeping sometimes don’t bother to keep aquariums at home. Lee and Lisa certainly don’t subscribe to that idea !
Editor's note Collecting Cichlids
in the Peruvian Amazon
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