Ron Harlan gave a talk on Saturday, the 16th of August, 1989 at the monthly meeting of the Southern California Killifish Club. Ron recently returned from a 2 week collecting trip to Peru. These are my notes.

Ron has three lives. Besides being a fine upstanding citizen, he also teaches Marine biology at Glendale college. In his third life, Ron runs _Back to nature filtration_, purveyors of fine reverse osmosis filters to the aquarium hobby. In this capacity, he also conducts occasional tours to South America. Any of you who read FAMA might have noticed his ads - he got 2/3 of the people on his expedition from that ad - mostly cichlid people, and mostly from New Jersey.

They started by meeting in Florida and taking a tour of a fish farm. Fish are bred in small pools, and tons of live food is dumped in. The pools are harvested after 6 months by setting traps or seining the fish out.

The next half dozen or so slides were of Ron and his entourage sitting and waiting in various airports. Florida, Lima, Iquitos.

Exhausted, and winded, the troop finally made it to their destination: Camp Amazon, ``The motel 6 of the Amazon basin''. The camp provided shelter, food, cars, horses and guides.

The first order of business was to establish a relationship with the camp mascots, a tamarind and a common marmoset. These are insectivores that sit idle for most of the time in the hot jungle sun, but as soon as an insect of any sort looms into views, the monkeys spring into life and consume it with amazing speed.

An expedition was staged to a local Indian village. The Ybarra Indians were not too far, and so the troupe set out for a visit. The village was empty when our gang arrived, but shortly thereafter a swarm of semi clothed Indians descended on the village.

The obligatory photos of bare breasted brown skinned women requisite to any tropical fish collecting trip were taken. To be sure, they were not as artistic as Heiko Blehr's in TFH.

The chief demonstrated the fine art of using a blow gun. He couldn't hit the log he was aiming at, let alone the target painted on the log. These people could not have relied on this device for food; they would have starved.

It turns out the Indians descended on the village en masse like that because they were out in the jungle changing out of their Levis and T-shirts.

A trip was scheduled to visit primal, virginal, rain forest in hopes of finding Rivulus species. A river was taken and the forest was entered. Ron showed us a slide of himself in the forest here. He had to use a flash as only the smallest amount of light gets down to the forest floor. They found many small pools, with a few inches of black water and a substrate of decaying leaves, but, after searching all day, not a single fish, Rivulus or otherwise, was found. found however, and was rather surprising, was a man. An Indian was encountered with a hatchet, machete and rifle. The guide explained that he was a Palm heart collector. They watched as he did his thing. He cut down a 30 year old palm tree, killing 3 other hardwood trees in the process of felling it. The heart of the Palm is removed, and after trimming, a foot long section the diameter of a quarter was the yield.

On another trip up a small rivulet, the guide suddenly stopped and explained that they couldn't go any further. The cocaine rebels ruled the next 200 Km of this river. Unfortunately this is the habitat for Corydoras panda, a very expensive and desirable species. The fish do exist in the commercial trade for the reason that some enterprising Peruvians slip up the river, capture the fish, and then package them as cocaine slipping them in with the shipments of coca paste that go to Medallen, where they are intercepted. This is the only way to get anything out of that part or Peru, to use the existing cocaine distribution routes. Certainly a reversal to an old game.

At this point, lots of medium and large cichlids, such as Cichla occelarus, oscars, chocolate cichlids and catfish had been found, but not the Dwarf cichlids and Killifish that were being sought. The large cichlids were eaten.

Another day, another trip. The guide was to take the troupe to a fish collecting place he knew of. An oxbow lake a few Km. up river. Oxbow lakes in general tend to be very good places to collect fish from as they always seem to have a lot of fish, and aren't too difficult to collect from.

Day three day at Amazon Camp came to an end, and they all moved to a river boat, which would serve as base camp for the next three days. This part of the trip covered the Rio Nanoy.

No collecting could be done here as the river was flooded.

After three frustrating days here, the next part of the trip was executed. Another river - the Rio Ucayalai, another river boat to serve as base camp.

After traveling for what seemed like forever upstream in the jungle heat, the guide, upon seeing an 8 inch mud clearing in the forest. This was his sign. They stopped the boat and walked a few hundred yards to the oxbow lake. They struck it rich. They had found a habitat for Apistogramma nijssena. The males occurred in the middle of a small pool, the females and juveniles occurred around the periphery. This is very similar to the way Cyprinidon species are found. The males congregate in the center, displaying, defending territory, while the females and juveniles live at the margins of the pond, only venturing toward the center of the pool, in the case of the females, for courtship.

Still no killifish however. This situation was about to be remedied, albeit, painfully.

The next day all the gear was packed in a truck and everybody set off towards the next days collecting site. The exact location is Genaro Herrara, on the road to the Brazilian border. After a few Km. the truck abruptly stopped, and the driver announced that the bridge was out, and that they would have to walk the next 8 Km. Now, 8 Km., or 5 miles, doesn't sound like too much, but this is high altitude Peru, in noonday sun, carrying heavy fish collecting equipment. (Perhaps they should have been on the lookout for Coca leaves - RJS) The trek was made and proved to be most rewarding. 1.5 Km along some water was found and since there are fish in most small pools and streams they they threw their nets in and managed to pull some Rivulus out of the water. These looked a lot like Epiplatys dageti, but was very small and thin. These are perhaps 1 1/2 inches when fully grown, and very thin. This fish is probably Rivulus atratus. At Kilometer 10, more rivulus were found. The fish collected here looked reminiscent of Aphyosemion striatum or Rivulus orthonotus. At Kilometer 13, more rivulus were found this time similar to those found at Km. 10. except these fish had more colour in their tails. These fish are possibly new to science.

On the last day, and last expedition, Ron collected fish from a collection point he discovered on the Tahauyo. 1 1/2 to 2 miles from here, is ``Piscina natural''. A natural swimming pool. This was a location upstream from the habitat of Apistogramma nijssena. He collected an Apistogramma which I call Apistogramma harlani. This species is apparently intermediate between nijssena and it's ancestors in the regani group. It looks very much like nijssena, but has an occellus towards the rear of the dorsal. It also differs from nijssena by having the first dorsal ray be black and the second dorsal ray be crimson red.

On the last day of their trip, the tour guide dragged out his wood carvings just like he had done on previous trips. Ron was prepared this time and had all sorts of stuff from discount stores to trade, such as fishermans jackets and the like. The carvings came in all shapes and sizes - bottles, bowels etc. Ron got a big salad bowl, made out of mahogany, with fish carved in the side - Arapaimia, Piranha. In Iquitos they discovered where he bought all these trinkets.

Oleg and I visited Rons base camp in Glendale, Ca. He has a tightly packed fishroom with the following species:

Killies: The three rivulus from his Peru trip. Aphyosemion australe, A. bivittatum volcanum Monea, A. christyi HZ 85/2 A. striatum, Epiplatys roloffi, E. sexfasciatus Malawi, E. chaperi, Austrofundulus limneus 88/1, Cynolebias nigripinnis.

Cichlids: Apistogramma nijssena aquarium strain, A. nijssena wild, A. agassizi red wild (spectacular), A. cacatuoides Yanayacu, A. harlani, the big crenicara (forgot it's name) wild, M. multispinosa, A. macmasteri, A., and a bunch of africans.

Other: Boesman and the blue rainbow. Tank raised Synodontis multipunctuatus (interesting fish. to keep these in anything less than a school of six is cruel. they are ``cukoo'' spawners in that they will put their eggs in the mouth of an incubating female mouthbrooding cichlid) and a pyrrulina that may be new to science - big, blue, with lots of red and big fins.

Ron offered us whatever we wanted. I wanted the red Agssizi. He said he'd put me on the waiting list. I settled for some water sprite, and asked if he had any christyi HZ 85/2 - no, he had one egg. Oleg fared better, he got 8 young apisto's. A mix of eunotus and cacatoides. The cacatuoides have some nice red shapes in their lyre tail, although they didnt have a lot of body color. I'm unimpressed with the eunotus, they're kinda plain.

Ron also gave me an old compressor when I told him I was running out of air, and already had 6 big diaphragm pumps going. Ron is now a dealer for Glast (or was it Blast) blowers, expensive at $300, but they make all the air you could ever use.

The compressor he gave me works, but draws 2 amps. Thats about $1 a day to run. I probably wont use it.

Richard Sexton Oct 5 1989