This is the type of content fish keepers need to see. its all good to "read" how to care for difference species of fish but with so much conflicting information, seeing the fish in their natural habitat helps alot in making the right choices. awesome work!

Thank you, Oliver, and any others who may have been a part of producing this video! Very good information, and wonderful video of these great fish in their natural habitat!

Beautiful video ! I love Rams ...but only the original

Great video. Thanks for showing something that no one else does

Love seeing the fish in natural conditions.

Another great video 👍🏼✌🏼

Thank you

So happy I found this channel, I've always wanted to.see natural habitats of aquarium fish. Btw I've looks periodically over the year on KZread for videos like this, only now it suggests it...

I could watch this 100 times and probably will.

Great Video!!! Thanks for sharing. :)

@belowwater

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks for watching!

Nice video showing ram in habitat. I bought a pair on march 2022 after watch from youtube about apistograma and ram. At first i want to buy a pair of apisto but its expensive, so i bought a pair of ram. I tought its hard to keep rams. But im lucky, 1 month later my rams hatched 200+ fry. Its their 2nd try. After 6 month i got 120 rams. I gave 40 to pet store near my house for 6 buck. Now i got 80, some already start breeding. But i just let them do their thing in my 4 feet and 2.5 feet planted tank.

This Video ist very interesting! Greetings from germany.

Que video espetacular, ja assisti umas 4 vezes

@belowwater

2 жыл бұрын

Obrigado!

thanks for accepting my request!! I'm looking for information on the habitat of the Mikrogeophagus spp 😁

Bless you thank you for a great video, I just ordered a pair a few minutes ago, I haven't bred for several years, hope my clown pleco spawn soon, I used to breed endlers and L144 and also common bristlenose

@belowwater

7 ай бұрын

thank you!

Great video. My pair is currently spawning and digging up the sand, which looks similar to their native habitat's sand.

@belowwater

Жыл бұрын

Good luck! Ramirezi fry are so small...

I love these videos. I think a bit of data that would be invaluable to share is a quick note of water conditions at the filming site. We hear such narrow numbers in the hobby, repeated for generations without question. But we know from some modern eco tourists that many of our “tropicals” are quite happy outside of the narrow temperature ranges we hear all the time.

@belowwater

9 ай бұрын

I don't usually measure it, because we visit in one week of the year, what we measure is not so meaningful - it would have to be measured every week over the year.

Do you know where that morichal at 2:36 was? In what state or area of the llanos?

Great video, thank you. Between 1:50 and 2:20 there are small red fish with black and white top fins. They look like Hyphessobrycon rosaceus but not as massive. Do you know what fish that might be?

@belowwater

Жыл бұрын

It is a Hyphessobrycon that usually gets imported as H.sweglesi - it is very common in Colombia.

Hello Oliver! I've just watched the rams in the wild video and was truly amazed at their density in their natural habitat. I don't know much about the morichal habitats but they look like clear water streams. I have seen a lot of articles suggesting rams are blackwater species and should be kept with other dwarf cichlids like apistos at cooler temperatures and low pH. Can you shed some light on this, and what sort of water conditions they are collected in, please? Many thanks for posting this, it's fascinating to see how one of my favorite dwarf cichlids lives in nature, makes me want to re-think the way I keep my fish.

@belowwater

Жыл бұрын

Yes, all those Morichal and Llanos habitats the rams occur in are clear water. The water is soft and slightly acidic, but not extreme like for some Apistogramma habitats. in the dry season the Morichales are often the only places with water, with the moriche palms growing in the water, and when the flood arrives the fish travel out into the floodplain. Typically you see rams with rummynose, which are just as widespread.

@shanejones578

Жыл бұрын

They like neutral ph, 6.5-7.5 and temps high. 80-82 I’d suggest.

@shanejones578

Жыл бұрын

Source - ram fanatic/keeper. Only ones I don’t keep are German blues and balloons. (Feel like they have bad genetics in my area). Oh and for Bolivian rams specifically 6-8 ph and 78-82 temp. They’re EXTREMELY hardy in my experience like toilet bowl fish lol

😊👍👍👍👍👍👍❤️🍀

This video has 168 likes. It should have about 20k more than that.

@belowwater

3 жыл бұрын

you know what kind of videos youtube likes....

Every once and awhile a half gold half pink tetra swims across the screen do you know what type it is?

@belowwater

7 ай бұрын

in some parts of the Llanos region _Hemigrammus stictus_ has that colour.

Wow, sehr interessant. Leider ist es fast unmöglich stabile SBB im Handel zu bekommen :-(.

@belowwater

3 жыл бұрын

in Nordamerika auch....

Do you ever go to the altispinosus habitat?

@belowwater

3 жыл бұрын

not since digital photography, will have to do that one day in the future!

Whats the gh and kh of the water they come from?

@belowwater

2 жыл бұрын

rams are in a wide variety of habitats, and those values change a great deal in the dry vs rainy season. Generally, the KH and GH are very low from 1-3 in these habitats.

I have trouble with rams,can't get the ph right.

@belowwater

Жыл бұрын

it is more the source. For wild fish really soft water is crucial. For European produced rams ("German rams" but usually from the Czech Republic) it is not as important. The really extreme bred stuff (albino, black, giant etc) from Asia can be sensitive to bacterial disease. Try to get some tank raised or well acclimated fish from a breeder.

So it wouldn‘t be a problem to stock a midsized tank with a group of them and not only 1 or 2 pairs... is that right?

@belowwater

3 жыл бұрын

No problem, if they start to breed, each pair will need to have about a 50cm circle for territory, so other fish will get pushed out of that area.

@hoefnerfishing

3 жыл бұрын

@@belowwater Thanks! Do you know if they also live in the Rio Meta system beside Corydoras metae? I own C. metae since 10 years and so I want to make a Rio Meta tank. 😁

@belowwater

3 жыл бұрын

@@hoefnerfishing yes, ramirezi are everywhere in the Orinoco lowland.

@hoefnerfishing

3 жыл бұрын

@@belowwater Perfect. One more question: Have you ever seen those two species beside each other?

@belowwater

3 жыл бұрын

I have not, that does not mean it does not happen. Generally i would say the M.ramirezi is a fish of the lowland Llanos region, and likes those slow moving morichales (Moriche palm swamps) and lagoons. The C.metae are usually closer to the mountains, in smaller, faster running creeks with slightly lower temperatures. You would typically see Apistogramma macmasteri there, which prefer those more shaded cooler (relative, i mean 24-26C, not 28-30C) places. I would not hesitate to keep those two fish you want together, because that distance is minimal and there may well be places where they occur together.

Hello Oliver! Are there geographic color varieties of M. ramirezi? Are all the wild imports expected to be as colorless as the ones in this video? Thank you in advance!

@belowwater

3 ай бұрын

all look the same, sadly tank raised rams have tons of colour but ugly deformed body shapes. in the right light and when breeding wild rams are very beautiful.

@minos64

3 ай бұрын

@@belowwater ​​⁠ Any way I could show you some pictures of the fish I got from 2 separate sources? Really could use your expert opinion. Thank you!

@belowwater

3 ай бұрын

@@minos64 you can reach me by facebook or from my website, but i think the differences are more likely to be diet during the time the fish were collected, or the water they were coming from.

"ramirezi" is named after Manuel Ramirez. So the scientific name is correctly pronounced "Ramirez-eye'.

@belowwater

2 ай бұрын

In latin the letter "i" is pronounced as "ee", I am aware that people in the US pronounce scientific names differently ("eye") than in other countries, there is no real rule on this.

What are those red-pink tetras with a black dorsal fin?

@belowwater

Жыл бұрын

It is a Hyphessobrycon that usually gets imported as H.sweglesi - it is very common in the Llanos region.

@peasantrobot

Жыл бұрын

@@belowwater thank you!

@peasantrobot

Жыл бұрын

@@belowwater looked for it.. So, it is a Red Phantom Tetra! I like very much the wild, original variant. Many aquarium variants are just horrible, with those huge dorsal fins... which no longer looks like a tetra. In my opinion, whether is a slim tetra, or deep body tetra, it MUST look like a tetra, not like a peacock!

@belowwater

Жыл бұрын

@@peasantrobot H.sweglesi has a lower dorsal fin, but many wild Hyphessobrycons have gigantic dorsal fins, that is not man-made, it is how the males signal the females. Check out H.procyon, H.ehrostigma or H.jackrobertsi to name some examples.

@peasantrobot

Жыл бұрын

@@belowwater now I've seen them, still, the specific shape is kept... I saw also your tetra guide with the new species... When you see a tetra, you know that is a tetra... shape of the fins, proportions, etc... Anyway, surely I am biased...

Need lovely 😍💋 💝💖❤️