A TALE OF TWO YELLOW BELLIES

My witticisms were completely lost on a surprisingly large number of the CFZ bloggofolk, because when I included a pleasantry about `yellow bellies` in my email post to Usenet yesterday, I had several e-mails asking what I meant.


In fact that is not true. I had several e-mails asking what I meant, two saying non comprende senor, and one saying "Oi. What the *****ing ***** was I ****ing well talking about?"


So I had better explain


The CFZ have indeed just taken delivery of a breeding group of yellow bellies, but they are the yellow bellied girardinus (Girardinus falcatus ), a small livebearing fish from Cuba which are distantly related to guppies.


The reason that we have them is part of our outreach projects, trying to breed them for our static displays.


However, I have always been fond of fish from the family Poeciliidae, and I do not really need much excuse to keep them


I have been keeping livebearing toothcarps since I was a small child when I used to catch feral guppies and gambusia in the catchment ponds of the stream that flows down from Victoria Peak to Pokfulam Reservoir on Hong Kong Island.


But the amusing thing about these fishes is that they have a strikingly similar name to one of Heuvelmans' original nine sea-serpent types as delineated in In the Wake of the Sea Serpents (1968)

He described it thus:


"A sea animal of very great size shaped like a tadpole. Usually of a very striking yellow colour marked with a black stripe along the spine, and black transverse bands along the sides. The huge flat head merges imperceptibly into the flat fusiform body, and the tail is extraordinarily long and tapering"

Fusiform, by the way means "having a spindle-like shape that is wide in the middle and tapers at both ends." (I didn't know either)

So my pathertic attempts at humour failed monstrously. However I am very fond of my little fishies, and intrigued by the crypto yellow belly which I think is a strange colour form of the whale shark, and Richard thinks is a colonial salp colony.


Watch this space... (perhaps)