BILL STONE: MEET AN AQUARIST SERIES by Howard Norfolk

What do career army officers do in their spare time – Bungee jumping? Crocodile wrestling? Well, in the case of Capt. W.A. Stone, he does just the same as all of us – he goes back home and looks after his fish! Not just a couple of tanks in his living quarters either, but sixty aquariums lined up from floor to ceiling around three walls of a room in his basement.

Bill Stone retired two years ago after forty two years as a Field Engineer/Military Engineer/Civilian Employee with the Canadian Forces. Despite being posted between Chilliwack B.C., Petawawa Ontario, Montreal, and Sydney Nova Scotia, he managed to actively keep up his great interest in fishkeeping for thirty eight of those years, except for a three year period when he was posted overseas and had to keep his tanks in storage.
Bill and his wife Jean have settled into a house on a quiet street in a semi-rural area near the army base at Chilliwack in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, and Bill divides his spare time between his fish, gardening, and playing Bass Drum with the kilted Chilliwack and District Pipe Band. The Pipe Band is a major commitment, involving playing at national and international festivals and competitions, as well as at local events. But it is the fish we are interested in….

To repeat, Bill has sixty aquariums in his fish room. They are arranged with military precision on metal shelving units. The shelves were made to be easily dismantled and transported, for the occasions when Bill’s military career required a move.
The upper shelves hold over a dozen highly decorated, fully landscaped 20 and 30 gallon aquariums, with gravel, rocks, wood and plants. They contain Bill’s collection of breeding and juvenile angelfish, except for one tank that has neon rainbows. They are individually lit with incandescent bulbs, and have under-gravel filters.

Angelfish with fry

The lower shelves house Bill’s main interest – killifish. He currently has about twenty species, mostly in ten gallon tanks. (Bill does not use two or five gallon tanks, preferring the relatively large ten gallon size even for a pair of tiny killifish, since water conditions remain more stable in a larger body of water. ‘Gang spawning’ is also possible). Some of these tanks are also fully landscaped , but most are bare bottomed with sponge filters and with the appropriate egg laying medium for the species concerned – mops, peat, or Java moss.
Bill’s breeding tanks are not brightly lit – each pair of tanks has two 25 watt chandelier lights attached to the wood shelf above. The lights are on dimmers and are dimmed when Bill is not observing or working on the tanks. Killies do not need bright light, many originating from deep within the rainforest. Bill dims the angelfish lights at night rather than turning them off. He feels that the angelfish parents are more comfortable and confident with ‘moonlight’ at night, and therefore less likely to eat their fry.
The room is kept at 76-78 ° F by means of a 220 watt electric baseboard heater. The many lights also contribute heat. A couple of tanks have their own heaters, for fish that require higher temperatures. Room air is circulated by a fan, which keeps the lower tanks at the correct temperature and reduces condensation problems.
Air for filtration is provided through a central system powered by a 1/3 h.p. Sweetwater Regenerative Blower. It runs all the time and is somewhat noisy, so it is installed in the garage and air is pumped in pipes through the house to the fish room. Before this, Bill had built his own air system using a truck air brake compressor. In case of failure, it was backed up by a unit made from an old '85 Chevy pollution pump.
Bill’s army experience and engineering abilities show up in many ways. The fish room is immaculate in every respect, with everything in its well thought out place. A spirit of ‘self sufficiency in the field’ inspired Bill to make much of his equipment himself. He made many of his own aquariums both wooden and all glass, and even made his own sponge filters – a square of glass with silicone feet and a perforated tube attached, with the cylindrical sponge cut by rotating a sharpened tin can. More impressive still is his brine shrimp hatchery, a complicated looking but very efficient gadget for hatching and retrieving large quantities of brine shrimp (see photo). Other touches of ingenuity abound and are in fact somewhat overwhelming. It would take several visits and many pages to describe all the evidence of Bill’s great knowledge of fishkeeping. One small detail is that all the killifish tanks are labelled with the respective species names in Latin (as they should be), - but not just any old label – the labels are printed and are magnetic to attach neatly to a specific spot on each tank.

Brine shrimp hatchery

One gets the impression that Bill gets almost as much satisfaction out of breeding and rearing worms and bugs for fish food as he does from fish! He rears several different types of live food. The smallest are microworms, which he feeds bread and milk rather than the more smelly oatmeal. Grindal worms are the next up in size: he breeds these in plastic trays of soil kept in a dark closet. Brine shrimp and daphnia are similar in size. Finally, Bill breeds white worms.
Bill rarely feeds dry or prepared flakes or pellets to his fish. Other than live foods, the staple for all his fish is beef heart, prepared according to a recipe he first published in a 1989 issue of The American Killifish Association.
Bill spends about an hour feeding his fish once a day (baby angels twice a day), and a weekday doing fortnightly 30% water changes.
As well as the different worm breeding operations, Bill’s closet and shelves and cabinets are full of killifish eggs. He keeps the plant spawners’ eggs wet in small trays for hatching after 14-21 days. The annuals’ eggs are kept dry (like moist pipe tobacco) in peat filled plastic bags, labelled and stored according to the month they are due to hatch.

Microworm cultures

Killifish are not dealt with extensively in the pet trade. New species and strains are collected in the field by amateur hobbyists, who travel overseas (to East Africa, South Africa, South America, etc.) and bring home the fish, which they then distribute, free or otherwise, to established breeders through networks of Killie Clubs. Killifish travel easily: adults only need enough water to cover their bodies, and dry eggs in peat are no problem to mail.
Bill is a member of his local club, The Vancouver Area Killie Club, which was founded in 1984 and has about twenty members. They meet once per month in members’ houses, and at each meeting there is an auction of fish, and also plants and other items. One member is designated the Species Acquisition member, who obtains fish and eggs from other clubs, and another member keeps the Species List. Club members currently keep about eighty species of killifish between them. Bill is developing a web page on the internet for the club, which can be seen at http://users.uniserve.com/~wastone

Landscaped angelfish tanks above, killifish breeding below.
In cabinet: microworm cultures and killifish egg storage trays

The VAKC is affiliated with The Canadian Killifish Association (journal “Killie Dirt”) and both are affiliated with The American Killifish Association. The AKA produces a bi-monthly journal and a monthly newsletter. Until his Pipe Band responsibilities got in the way, Bill often arranged his annual holiday to coincide with the AKA Annual Convention, which is held on the last weekend in May (Memorial Day). He attended two conventions in California, and one each in Buffalo, North Bergen N.J., Cleveland and Cincinnati, and has a number of plaques and trophies in his rec. room to prove it.
Bill’s engineering talents also extend to woodwork. When not busy in his fish room he can relax in his rec. room by looking at a unique 90 gallon tank he made years ago using ž inch mahogany veneered plywood with a green fibreglass lining. The tank contains a collection of mature angelfish bred by Bill or his friends, and numerous plants including four large healthy Amazon swords.

Some of Bill's fishkeeping trophies

Postscript: Bill would like to point out that many killifish species are endangered or extinct in the wild, due to habitat destruction. Serious killifish keepers are dedicated to keeping these species alive and their bloodlines pure.
   When you keep killifish, do not put different but related species in the same tank, in case they breed and produce cross species.
   It is also important to keep the aquariums, incubation trays, incubating bags of peat and hatching containers labelled with the species’ proper name and location code. When you sell or give away a pair of fish, ensure that you label the bag for the recipient’s information as well.
   Killifish can jump, and travel from tank to tank. Keep your tanks covered and related species apart – their tanks should not be adjacent or above or below each other.
   Do not introduce a related species into a permanently set up tank that you just had similar species in, since there could be eggs in the gravel or plants and this could also result in hybrids. Bill switches tanks between annuals and non-annuals or leaves the tank without fish for triple the incubation time, to ensure there are no fry lurking to cause hybrids.

Note: Bill's article about making beef heart fish food may be viewed in Aquarticles' Aquarium Management/Feeding section.