Greenthumb

Lucania goodei were my "gateway fish" into the hobby and still one of my favorites. They showed up in the pond plants at the garden center where I work and it kind of grew from there... Also how I got my Golden Topminnows. Very cool to see the hatching process, I've had Lucania for years and never took the time to collect the eggs and hatch them out. Great summer tub fish if you don't mind only seeing them when you put them out in the spring and again when you clean out the tub for the winter.

They are just really efficient predators, I use 3 in a 10 gallon colony and 6-7 in a 20 long. Mine spend most of their time picking at the sponge filter and popping in and out of the hornwort. They behave and look more like a characin than a killifish. Small (2" or less), mid-lower water, shoaling, and peaceful (no fin nipping in my experience). They look like they would have a really small mouth but don't let it fool you, mine will at least attempt to eat anything that is less than the diameter of their eye. The males are also absolutely stunning when they display.

I use a couple/three bluefin killifish (Lucania goodei) to "turn off" my guppy and livebearer colonies and then pull them out once or twice a year to allow a few females to drop. Just use all males so they don't spawn. Voracious little omnivores. The easiest way to find them is to check the feeder guppy tank at your LFS, they are really common hitchhikers in those shipments. Their eggs also show up pretty regularly in water plant shipments out of Florida, that's how I got mine. Golden topminnows will eat pretty much whatever you put in front of them if it will fit in their mouth. Mine love bladder snails and will happily slurp ramshorn snails out of their shells. They also eat fry and aren't above sampling algae. If you were talking larger fish you might look into some of the smaller Lepomis sunfish.

I've probably bred a couple of hundred of them over the past few years. I generally put my breeder age fish into a 300 gallon tub stuffed with horn wort and tropical water lilies for the summer. Then I sell the surplus fry to several of my LFS when I clean it out in the fall. I've polycultured them with Florida Flag Fish for two summers now and I haven't seen a drop in fry numbers from the Paradise Fish as a result. Last summer I put 5 paradise fish (1 male and 4 females) and 7 Florida Flag Fish (mixed) in the tub Memorial Day weekend and When I cleaned the tub out on Labor Day weekend I had 63 paradise fish and 94 flag fish. Not great numbers compared to some of the more professional breeders but its hard enough to find buyers for what I currently produce in a year as it is. Most of my breeding is focused on maintaining the color in my existing line and trying to get it to breed true. Every year about a quarter to a third of the fry are striped. I'm beginning to wonder if there is some Mendelian genetics going on here. My hypothesis is that the genes for the stripe less phenotype are dominant over the striped phenotype and so some of the breeders that I'm keeping are probably heterozygous for stripe-less (stastically 2/3 of the stripe-less fish would be heterozygous)? The second possibility is that the stripe-less fish are genetically striped but with reduced expression of the gene in the phenotype. If anybody knows the genetics and would want to weigh in I'd welcome the info. Paradise fish have been extensively scientifically studied (they were the primary "model organism" for fish in a laboratory setting before zebra danios and rice fish became popular) so I'm pretty confident that somebody has looked into it or published a paper about it or at least has an idea what is going on.

I've been breeding these Blue Paradise Fish for a couple of years now. Thought it was about time that I posted a couple pictures. Sorry for the poor quality photos, I suck at taking photos of fish. This was a very happy male who was getting a nest ready so he was really colored up nicely. My brother posted a photo of my fish here a while back. I should have new photos in about a moth or so when I clean out the tub they're in outside.