As a long time cichlid keeper, I have sourced my fish from a variety of vendors – both online and my LFS. I have made it no secret here on the blog that one of my favorite online sources is Dave’s Rare Aquarium Fish. Owned by Dave Schumacher and specializing in African cichlids (mostly the rift lakes), this San Antonio, TX based business is first class. From the quality of the fish to expertly bagged, boxed, and shipped orders, Dave does it right. Some of the best fish I have ever had (and still have) came from him.
I interviewed Dave back in the summer of 2019. I recommend you check that out, where you can also read a brief bio. I correspond with Dave on a semi-regular basis. A few months ago, it occurred to me that my first interview with him was before the pandemic, so I decided to see if he wanted to do another and bring us up to speed on his business. He agreed. Let’s get started.
You did your first interview with The Cichlid Stage three years ago. Sans the pandemic, tell the readers what has changed with your business since 2019.
The biggest change since the last interview is that I’ve moved. When I first opened my shop in 2006, I had a walk-in store at a major highway intersection in San Antonio. There was a good amount of foot traffic, but a lot of visitors were just killing time. The bulk of my sales came through the website, so I shut down the walk-in store in 2011 to focus on that. I was still paying rent though on a retail shopping center location. Although it would have saved me some money to move to more of a warehouse location, what I really wanted to do was find a home somewhere that I could build a shop on the property and work from home. That finally happened, and my commute to work is now a 50 foot walk out my back door. The rental cost for my old facility was roughly the same as my entire mortgage now. It’s been great!
In what ways has the pandemic changed the cichlid retail industry as well as your own business?
It turned out that I had moved just in time – only about 6 months after we were settled in here, the lockdown started. I figured that I would have a bunch of down time for a couple months while we waited out COVID (hilarious in hindsight!), so I bought a bunch of lumber to build some racks and a small storage building. Things never slowed down, but I was certainly glad I bought that lumber as I watched the prices shoot up! The storage building still hasn’t been built.
To my surprise, there was no down time. Sales exploded as those fortunate enough to be able to work from home found themselves looking for hobbies they could do from home. It worked out great in my household because my wife’s job is in restaurant sales. My business picked up as hers dipped, so it balanced out.
In the short term, the surge in new fish keepers caused shortages on more common fish like Labidochromis caeruleus Lion’s Cove (yellow labs) and Iodotropheus sprengerae (rusties). These fish are pretty regularly available again now.
The biggest blow to the hobby has been the increased freight costs. Very few imports are coming in from Africa anymore because the landed cost of each fish is just too high to swallow. A wild cichlid from Malawi or Tanganyika that retailed for $50 in 2019 would be $100-150 now because the freight has nearly tripled.
What do you think sets you apart from the dozens of other online cichlid vendors?
One thing, for better or worse, is I don’t have a shopping cart on my site. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that I want to talk out the orders with my customers to ensure they are successful with the fish they’ve picked out. When someone orders four Chindongo demasoni, I want the chance to suggest that they go with 10 or more to spread out the aggression, or suggest a more mild mannered species. When someone orders a juvenile Altolamprologus calvus and a Nimbochromis venustus, I want to make sure they’re not going in the same tank (if the same size at the time, the venustus will be large enough to eat the calvus within a few months!). I’m sure I lose some sales by forcing people to call, email, or text in orders, but I feel better knowing that the customer is aware of any potential issues and doesn’t learn everything by trial and error.
Another is that I focus on wild-type fish. While I do carry a handful of line bred variants like Rubescens peacocks (Aulonocara sp. “Stuartgranti Maleri” line bred for a red/orange color vs. the natural yellow color), I don’t stock any hybrids. Many of the fish we enjoy in our tanks are endangered, extinct in the wild, or located in an area that isn’t often fished. If they become hybridized, the option to collect more in the wild isn’t always there.
Talk about your process for deciding which species to breed and which to import and sell F0?
Although I do this for a living, I’m still very much a hobbyist at heart. I try to split my focus on breeding fish that excite me personally, and fish that will sell well. There are a number of species of Lake Victoria basin cichlids that I breed that I will always keep around for conservation reasons as well. Most are beautiful and easy to work with, yet not readily available in the hobby.
At the moment, I don’t import any wild African fish because of the freight prices I mentioned earlier. When/if rates become reasonable again, I mostly import fish that aren’t already available as bred fish. If it’s a species that is endangered or at risk, I like to know why before importing them. For example, Eretmodus cyanostictus are readily available on import lists, but are considered “Near Threatened”. They’re very common on the rocky shores of Tanganyika, but the shore has been receding. If it recedes past the rocky zone, they’re not likely to survive over open sand. I would happily import these fish, because they are not suffering pressures due to over-collecting for our hobby. On the other hand, Chindongo saulosi are found only at Taiwanee Reef, which Ad Konings described as roughly the size of a quarter of a football field. They’re only endangered because we want them in our tanks. I won’t contribute to their decline in the wild, and will focus on keeping these available through bred sources.
You still carry a good variety of mbuna. What are some mbuna species that you don’t have very often but would like to offer more frequently?
Some of the most overlooked mbuna in my opinion are Tropheops and Petrotilapia. I always carry a couple species, but they never sell well. Most Tropheops are highly aggressive, so I can see that as a deterrent. The Petrotilapia species I’ve worked with have never been overly aggressive though, and provide a very different look amongst other mbuna. They’re also known for being some of the larger mbuna species.
I am partial to dwarf species, specifically Lake Tanganyikan lamprologines. However, Lake Malawi has some cichlids considered dwarves (e.g., Pseudotropheus saulosi), even some shell dwellers (from the Metriaclima genus). Can you talk about the Malawi dwarves you carry and whether you can get shell dwellers from there?
The term dwarf is all relative, and so much is dependent on how we care for them in the aquarium. I would consider demasoni a dwarf species for sure, as they only grow to 2-3 inches in the wild. I’ve seen people over feed them and grow them to over 5 inches!
Metriaclima lanisticola and the recently described Metriaclima ngarae are the true shell dwellers of Malawi. They live in the empty shells of Lanistes snails in the lake. Metriaclima ngarae was available pretty regularly 15-20 years ago (we were still calling them lanisticola at the time), but haven’t been around lately. They’re often confused with another species, Pseudotropheus livingstonii. They’re a fun species as well, but only use shells as juveniles. As adults, they’re much larger, and end up schooling and behaving more like Pseudotropheus sp. “Acei”.
Let’s talk snails for a minute. You carry a few species. Do you have plans to carry more snails and what should aquarists who’ve never kept snails in their cichlid tanks know about these curious creatures?
Years ago, I had someone talk me into trying out some Neritina reclivata (olive nerite) for algae control. While they’re not fast, they’re very thorough cleaners, and eat even the hard, scaly algae you’d typically need a razor to scrape off the glass. I was apprehensive because the only other snails I had experience with were trumpet snails, and that’s never a good experience! What’s different with nerites is that they absolutely will not overrun the tank. They live in freshwater streams in Southeast Asia. They lay eggs, and when hatched, have a larval stage. These larvae wash out to sea, and require saltwater to develop, then crawl back into freshwater to breed. While they will lay eggs in our tanks, we’d need to remove the eggs and raise them in saltwater for them to develop. It won’t happen without a great deal of effort on our part.
There’s not a ton of information out there on the different species of nerites, but I’ve found over the years that only a handful are fully aquatic. In the past, I’ve carried some beautiful species like tiger nerites, zebra nerites, and red onion nerites, only to find half of them on the floor or crawling on the outside glass overnight. A tight fitting lid will keep them in, but I found that there were much higher losses with these species – possibly because I wasn’t providing them a way to get out of the water. The species I carry now I keep in tanks with no lids, and it’s extremely rare to find any climbing above the water line.
If you’re willing to share, what are your plans for Dave’s Rare Aquarium Fish in the next two-three years?
Overall, I’m just hoping for more of the same! I’ve always found it funny that businesses, no matter how large, measure their successes based on growth. If I grow sales too much, I’ll need employees, and that will just provide a whole new set of problems, I’m sure. I’m pretty happy with the way things are, and hope I get to continue paying the bills with a hobby I thoroughly enjoy!
During the pandemic, I did pick up a new hobby – terrestrial isopods. It’s spiraled a bit out of control, and I need to find an outlet for all the offspring they’re constantly giving me. I will eventually either add them to my site, or create a new site entirely for them. There is a lot of overlap between the fish hobby and isopod hobby. In the various facebook groups I’ve joined, I’ve noticed many of my fish friends are a part of them as well.
Thanks again for doing another interview for the blog. Anything about the hobby you would like to comment on that we didn’t go into above?
Thanks for asking me to do another!