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Lapradei Experiment

I've always been fascinated with the PBB var Turkana when I first laid my eyes on them in youtube. The thing about them is they swim, yes they swim like a regular fish unlike any lower jaw bichir you see. What intrigue me is why do they possessed this ability when the rest of the clan do not?

Could it be because of the depth at lake Turkana or is there something else?  I've been studying the water and the lake with all possible information that I can find online.

Polypterus Lapradei enjoys swimming.
When the batch of Lapradei had successfully learned to controlled their buoyancy with their lung, they swim a lot, and swimming no longer becomes a struggle. 

I was patiently waiting for a batch of wild caught PBB fry for more than a year but with no luck. Finally I bought a batch of captive breed Lapradei Fry at 3" for my experiment seeing them being the closest thing I can find.

What I found about the water of lake Turkana surprises me, it is a salt lake, and very salty indeed. The lake is at 20ppt or 2% salinity. This is in the extreme range. My previous batch of PBB was kept at 10ppt salinity. Nothing much of spectacular happened when I kept my PBBs at this range. They dont swim much just lying there the whole time. And even when I feed them live fishes they swim with complete clumsiness unlike the Turk var.


What I did notice with keeping them in high salinity was that their marking get intense which was the same with my previous PBBs. I've kept this batch in white sand to see if their marking would come out and yes they did even in white sand.

So I figured I need to start them from very young and train them to surface feed with floating pellet. The objective is to train the fish to substitute its lung as swim bladder. Controlled buoyancy exercise.
Usually lower jaw will swim without the assistance of the lung acting as buoyancy control, they hard paddle the fin and struggle to hoover at a specific depth.

The batch of Lap is being kept in brackish water, starting at 1ppt and I slowly raised them and they are now at 9ppt or 1.005sg in a period of 1.5 months. They are now expert in using their lung as swim bladder and they can hoover at a specific depth with no struggling.

Next thing is the PH, lake Turkana's PH stands at 9 - 10PH which is crazy high. My water is now at 8.5PH and I need to find a way to raise them to 9. 

Another thing about the Turkana's PBB is the head shape, they are usually very spoony which is the unique trait of the var. And I did stumble on something about the water chemistry of lake Turkana.
The water is dangerously high in calcium fluoride.


Fluoride in high doses is a poison and can cause a lot of problem and one of the problem that is most interesting here is the deformity of the skull.



Could this be the answer as to why the var Turkana has such spoon head trait? The only way to find out is to do an experiment and I'm still considering if I should do this. I contacted my friend from the pharmacy and the closest I can find is Sodium Fluoride which is F in synthetic form. I'm still looking for Calcium Fluoride which are not as potent as sodium fluoride. The main hinder would be how do I test the fluoride when I cant find a fluoride tester?

Currently at 9ppt and I will let you guys know the threshold of salinity with bichirs


Turkana PBB swimming




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