Aphyosemion cameronense

Aphyosemion cameronense is a beautiful and highly variable species of killifish.  Its range includes the Inland Plateau of southern Cameroon, Rio Muni & northern Gabon.  It is generally found in slow moving rainforest streams, and can be found in the drainage systems of the Boumba, Boume, Dja, Lobo, Nyong, Sanaga & Upper Ivindo rivers.

Like most other rainforest dwelling killies it prefers cool, soft, acidic water.  Like most of my plant spawning killies, I currently keep my water around 120-150ppm hardness and 75 °, I don’t check pH.  I raise fry in straight tap water, which for me ranges from 225 to 350ppm hardness. 

A. cameronense doesn’t seem to like prepared foods.  I feed them a range of live & frozen foods including frozen blood worms, frozen tubifex worms, white worms, black worms, fruit flies, chopped red worms, daphnia, baby brine shrimp and grindal worms.  Fry get baby brine shrimp, microworms and golden pearls and grow rapidly.

This is a plant spawning species and breeding is fairly simple.  They can be bred using a spawning mop.  You can pick eggs and incubate them in water or on damp peat moss; incubation takes 14-21 days.  Another way to incubate the eggs is to pull the mop from the tank, squeeze out the excess water, and store in a Ziploc bag.  When using one of the above methods I like to keep the male and female separate for conditioning and then put them together for a day or two for spawning.  This typically gives a larger number of eggs.

Another method of spawning them is the method I learned from Gary Greenwood & John Metzger, and the method I currently use.  I fill a 2.5 or 5 gallon tank approximately half full of long fiber sphagnum moss.  Usually I will pre-soak the moss until it sinks before adding the fish.  These “natural” setups get large weekly water changes to maintain water quality.  I feed live/frozen foods daily, and these tanks always get baby brine shrimp as well.

Usually within 4-6 weeks I start seeing ¼” long fry hiding in the moss or hovering just above it.  At this point I set up an identical tank and move the parents.  The fry grow fairly quickly and show signs of sexing out at 2-3 months.  Once I see a large number of fry in the 2.5 gallon and they have a little bit of size on them, I will carefully remove the moss, small amounts at a time, by hand.  Once most of the moss is out of the tank, I will transfer the entire contents of the tank to a 10 or 20 gallon tank.  At this point I start feeding the fry grindal worms as well as baby brine shrimp. 

Usually with the various Aphyosemion species I’ve spawned, I’ll get fry gradually coming out of the moss as they get bigger and I’ll have a range of sizes.  I originally had a group of around 10 fry, after another month another group of fry came out of hiding.  This was a bigger group of fry, but much younger.  I’m guessing water quality dropped a bit and the fish stopped spawning for a while.  When I did a water change they probably spawned heavily for a couple of days before I noticed fry and pulled the adults from the tank. 

I picked up the Yen BDBG 04/04 strain at the WAKO show in November.  It’s been easy to breed so far and the fry have grown pretty quickly.  I’m told however that they take a long time to sex out reliably; 6 months or more.  I wouldn’t recommend this species for beginners, but if you have some experience with killifish, this is a good next step.  Aphyosemion cameronense is a little more demanding about water quality and food than the easier species, but if you meet their needs they are easy to raise.