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A dream job with East African cichlids

Jeremy Gay visits a reader who has about 800 tanks – some 6m/20’ long – of Victorian and Malawi cichlids to look after. And he gets paid for doing it!

Copyright © Practical Fishkeeping

Two years ago, Matt Clarke wrote about what he wanted for Christmas – some Lake Victoria cichlids, namely Pundamilia nyererei ‘Python Island’. His wish was granted by reader and scientist Alan Smith, who is lucky enough to be working with and studying that very fish – plus a whole lot more.

Matt replied to Alan’s kind offer and a while later I asked Alan if I could visit his fish collection. Little did I know that his ‘collection’ was in fact the University of Hull’s fish collection, there because of world cichlid experts Professors George Turner and Ole Seehausen.

George Turner is a professor of evolutionary biology and biodiversity at Hull, and president of the British Cichlid Association.



His work includes studying adaptive radiation and explosive speciation in Lake Malawi and Victoria.

Ole Seehausen now lives in Switzerland and is professor of aquatic ecology and evolution at the university of Bern, and head of fish ecology and evolution at the EAWAG limnological research centre.

His name is synonymous with the cichlids of Lake Victoria and his book, Lake Victoria Rock Cichlids, Taxonomy, Ecology and Distribution, is a definitive work on the subject.

I met Alan for the first time, along with colleague Katie Woodhouse. Katie is a research technician for the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). She studies mate choice based on colour between Pundamilia pundamilia and Pundamilia nyererei.



Alan is a part-time PhD student and full-time research technician at the University and studies genetics, sex determination and polymorphism in east African cichlids.

I asked Alan how he got to have such a great job, surrounded by cichlids. He said he always wanted to be a biologist and when he finished at the University of Leeds with a degree in Applied Biology, he got a job working with Tilapia at the University of Southampton.

George Turner and Ole Seehausen were based at Southampton at the time, and when they moved to Hull they convinced Alan to transfer, too, and to take up a part-time PhD.



Great job!
If you are keen on cichlids you would love Alan’s job. He looks after about 800 tanks, some of which are 6m/20’ long, and says that when it comes to choosing species to study he gets a free rein.

None of those tanks are lightly stocked, either; they fill four or five rooms from top to bottom and teem with Malawi and Victoria cichlids, many of which are unavailable in the trade.

Alan and Katie keep a record of every single fish for the Home Office as they are classed as research animals and, at the last count, had over 10,000 in a total water volume of over 30,000 l./6,607gal.



The Victorian cichlids were wild caught by Ole Seehausen himself, and are not available in the trade as commercial fish. Take Neochromis omnicaeruleus, for example.

Not a common fish, Alan has examples from populations in Makobe, Ruti, and Kunene. He also has Paralabidochromis chilotes from Ruti and Makobe, and Pundamilia nyererei from Python Island, Makobe and Senga. Alan has Malawis and Victorians at home, too.

Part of Alan’s job is to create hybrids and study their sex ratios and colours. This gives an idea of the number of genes involved, dominance of the gene, and whether the same gene is responsible in different lakes.



Alan has found that it is the same gene that causes blotched fish in lake Malawi and Victoria. This tells him the gene must have been there since ancient times, and he believes this is a bit of a breakthrough.

They have also found that sound and smell are important in mate choice, helping avoid hybrids occurring in the wild. He does a lot of work with Metriaclima estherae as they are readily available and prolific breeders.

They also hybridised with a Neochromis omnicaeruleus from Lake Victoria, causing a new study.Their work is never finished because one experiment leads to more questions and a whole new line of work will stem from that.

I asked if they were involved with any conservation projects linked with Lake Victoria and Alan said that Ole was, but since found populations that they thought had disappeared, so it is not such a priority. And once they get going they are so easy to breed.

Alan has thousands of Victorians and knows exactly which is which – even the hybrids and relevant parents! Occasionally they get shops phoning to ask if they sell cichlids, but none of the trade really know what the Victorians are so there is no call for them – and hybrids can’t be sold on.

Alan put some Paralabidochromis chilotes on Ebay once and received bids of only £1.50! To put that into perspective, I had a trio of P. chilotes that I obtained from a specialist wholesaler in Germany and which cost me £100 for the trio!

The set-up
The tank set-ups were quite daunting; the rooms don’t have any windows and the doors are heavy metal with coded locks. There are tanks on every wall, several tiers high, some 3m/10’ in the air.

I instantly recognised the protruding lips of Paralabidochromis chilotes and the rainbow coloration of male Pundamilia nyererei, but other species were completely new to me, not to mention Alan’s hybrids.



The tanks are all bare, bar some pots and pipes for fish to hide in. They are centrally filtered using large trickle towers, sumps and loads of UV. Some of the newer systems were automated, too, with automatic top-ups and alarms that warn of high temperatures. About 15% of the water is changed daily.

Fish feed on a combination of ZM floating and sinking pellets, along with King British tropical flake and OSI spirulina flakes. They also get peas and prawns occasionally.



Katie explained: “Because we work with colour it’s important that we get the fish to be as colourful as possible.” I asked if they had any problems with Malawi bloat and Katie said: “We don’t get many problems, even though some of our mbuna are wild.

The food combination we use is not that high in protein, although the Victorians are fed slightly higher protein than the Malawi mbuna.” Alan explained that George Turner’s theory on Malawi bloat is that it’s a mixture of stress and food, but you have to have a parasite present first.

Adult fish are fed once a day, juveniles twice a day on a diet including newly-hatched brineshrimp.



As well as Malawis and Victorians they also have cichlids from all over east Africa, including lots of Tilapia, and fish from Lake Barombi Mbo.

Alan said they would study the Barombi Mbo cichlids in more depth but they don’t currently have the room, so he keeps Stomatepia pindu as his pets.

In the same building are rooms full of guppies and genetic studies on fish from Lake Tanganyika.



Fancy a job like Alan’s?
Alan says a good place to start is somewhere like Sparsholt college in Hampshire.

A scientific background helps but you need to be a good fishkeeper, too.

Katie had to do her Masters before she got her job, and it came about from regular emails to Ole.



Alan has already been to Lake Malawi and Trinidad to study guppies and would like to revisit Malawi and visit Lake Victoria.

A group of scientists at Hull University including Ole, George, Martin Plenderleith, Ola Svenson, Domino Joyce, Alan and Katie, have published hundreds of scientific papers on cichlids.

This article was first published in the August 2006 issue of Practical Fishkeeping. It may not be reproduced without permission.

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Jeremy Gay 1334 (words, 14700 hits)
Published online: 04.24.09


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