The Amature Years...趣味者的年代...
One afternoon in the summer of 1960 when I went to my father's office, my uncle told me to follow him to visit a friend who was breeding discus. The hatchery is inside his apartment located only a few buildings away. There is a strong smell of kerosene as soon as we enter the pitch-black living room. It takes me a minute to adjust to the weak light before I can see well enough to walk around. While I am still standing at the door, my uncle's friend tells me to approach the aquarium very slowly and as quietly as possible. There are about a dozen tanks with all the sides covered up with newspaper. I peep into the small hole in the newspaper of the closest aquarium to see a pair of discus guarding a cluster of eggs on a flower pot, placed upside down in the bare tank. The aquarium is aerated by a gentle stream of bubbles from an air stone. After a couple of minutes we are told to leave.
ABOVE: Chinese edition of Tropical Fish Hobbyist
I asked my uncle why his friend was so concerned about me disturbing the fish on the way home. He told me discus breeders believe noises and vibrations frighten brooding discus to result in the parents eating their eggs and larvae. This explains why the hatchery we just visited was so dark and quiet. Together with the choking smell of kerosene, a discus farm in old Hong Kong was not at all a nice place to work inside.
Hong Kong was breeding a lot of Brown Discus for export as early as 1956 or '57. Wild discus were imported from Brazil as broodstocks initially which were replaced by local bred fishes in later years. Discus has always been rare and valuable. In the early '60s a pair was worth at least a month's average salary of 330 HK dollars. A 5 cm fish was retailed at 4-5 US dollars in New York, USA. As a brood of discus could be as many as 200-300 fry, it was not surprising a lot of people were breeding them.
Hong Kong in the 1950s and '60s was an ideal place to breed discus. The humid subtropical climate means heating the aquarium is only necessary in winter months. Water was mainly rainwater which was very soft and acidic. We have high temperature for more than half of the year. Heating the aquarium is only necessary during winter months. There was also an abundance of live foods such as tubifex, bloodworms, moina (a daphnia like creature) and small shrimps.
Tropical fish was very popular in Hong Kong in the 1950-'60s. There were few entertainments except radio broadcasts and local made movies. These B/W film is shot within a week on a very low budget which are nicknamed "Seven Days Movie". Only rich people can afford to buy a TV set. Most households do not even have a radio. In 1965, Tropical Fish Hobbyist, the largest magazine of the hobby, began to publish a Chinese version. Besides the many small discus hatcheries all over Hong Kong, there were also many farms in the New Territories breeding all kinds of tropical fish for export.
The flourishing tropical fish hobby and the ornamental fish export industry was gradually brought to an end by severe water shortages beginning as early as in 1957. The supply of tap water was reduced to four hours every four days during the worst period in 1963.
The problem was finally resolved when the British Hong Kong government signed a contract with China to purchase water from Guangdong province in April, 1964. Water restriction was terminated on March 1st, 1995 with the arrival of East River water . However, the relief came too late. Nearly all the discus hatcheries, especially those inside the city, have disappeared during the previous years.
I was working at my father's jadeite company on Queen's Road Central after graduation from the university in 1973. I went everyday after work to hunt for exotic fish in a small shop on Mercer Street which was only 2-3 minutes away by walking. I have been buying from this shop since the late '50s so I know the owner Mr. Wong well. One day in late 1980 he asked me whether I was adventurous enough to keep exotic discus. He told me there was a very beautiful newly imported Thai variety called the Red Discus. I said yes. The next day there were six of them swimming in Mr. Wong's tank. Before I started to select, he told me these discus had been treated with hormones in Thailand before export and were sterilized. I said no problem because I only want to look at them. Without knowing how to distinguish the sexes, I just picked two. To the surprise of everybody, the two fishes spawned within a week and subsequently raise the brood like model parents.
I found out years later this so-called Red Discus from Thailand is known as Red Royal Blue in Japan (abbreviated as RRB). This variety is the most important discus in the history of hybridization. From it the Pigeon Blood and the 13 bar Snakeskin Discus were developed which were to become in later years the ancestors of nearly all the modern hybrids.
ABOVE: Mr. Wong's shop on Mercer Street in 1990, photo courtesy of Marc Weiss, USA
ABOVE: Mr. Wong and I in 1990, photo courtesy of Marc Weiss, USA
There were about 100 fry in my brood, too many to be kept in the four small tanks at home. I took some back to Mr. Wong for sale. I met Ng Ching Yung Rocky at Mr. Wong's shop a few weeks later on a Sunday afternoon. He went there to see my baby discus as soon as he had heard about my success. He purchased a pair for 3,000 HK dollars a few months ago but had no succedd in breeding them. We became very good friends almost immediately.
A large number of RRB was imported in early 1981 following my success. Despite having been fed with hormone, these Thai fish were still very fertile. That brought back a revival in discus breeding and also paved the way for Hong Kong to replace Germany as the center for quality discus production in a few years' time. From 1981-'83 Hong Kong was exporting a lot of 5-6 cm size RRB to Europe, Japan and the USA.
Soon Rocky and I were not satisfied in just having RRB in our tanks. We started to look for new varieties locally yet found nothing of interest. In 1982 we succeeded in importing the first shipment from Aquarium Glaser in West Germany. This was followed by other shipments once or twice a year for five more years. The later shipments were the discus bred by Dr. Eduard Schmidt-Focke and also those that he hand-picked from his friends as well as exceptional specimens from Manfred Göbel. These valuable discus became the parents of all our best strains in the later years.
ABOVE: One of the many letters from Dr. Eduard Schmidt-Focke
I wrote to Dr. Eduard Schmidt-Focke in late 1982. We soon became very good friends despite our differences in age and culture. We wrote to each other at least once every month for many years until Eduard was too old to continue. The doctor taught me everything that he knows about discus in his many letters to me. In 1985 I named my newly borned son Edward as my gratitude to this great man who was both my good friend and mentor.
I also contacted Jack Wattley in 1882 with the purpose to purchase his discus. We too became friends. In 1983 Jack and his wife Gloria came to visit me in Hong Kong. I took Jack to buy Brown Discus pairs in the New Teritories. These were shipped together with some of our young discus soon after he had returned to America.
Marc Weiss wrote to me in 1982 asking for permission to publish an article that I had written for the British Discus Assocation a few weeks ago. Marc was the secretary of the American Discus Study Group at the time. I agreed to his request and we soon became very good friends. The letters we wrote to each other on A4 size paper were 8-10 pages long. In later years letters were replaced by fax messages and phone calls. Besides long correspondences, he also sent me magazines, articles, samples of discus products and medications.
Above: Showing Frank Hoff the marine fish farms in Lamma Island
I received a letter from Frank Hoff, Jr. in the spring of 1984. He was referred by Marc to contact me after he wrote to the Discus Study Group. Frank was working at the time with two friends to build a large discus farm in Florida, USA. They were looking everywhere for high quality broodstocks. I sent him photos of the discus we had at the time. I also recommended they should also breed Red Royal Blue. After the exchange of a few more letters, Frank and his two partners, Dennis Wilcox and John Atchison came to visit me in Hong Kong.
After visiting our homes to see the discus and some sightseeing, we flew to Bangkok. We spent the next few days visiting the biggest discus farms. They were successful in purchasing all the broodstocks necessary for the business with the help of Mr. Virat, proprietor of White Crane Aquarium.
Frank was the manger of Instant Ocean Hatcheries in Dade City, Florida, USA; which was the first inland farm in the world using synthetic sea water to breed marine ornamental fish. He lost his job upon the closure of Instant Ocean Hatcheries a few months ago and then joined Dennis and John as the technical advisor of the discus project. I learn from Frank the mass culture of fish and automated aquarium systems. The hatcheries that I built in the later years were all based on his design.
We succeeded in breeding Brilliant Turquoise in the summer of 1983 which was followed by other German imports. Local importers soon began to import large amounts of turquoise discus from West Germany very soon after our success. As we were hybbyists at the time, we sold our young discus to everybody. Due to their beauty and exceptional fertility, they were used as broodstock in every local discus hatchery in those days.
Hong Kong became the world's largest producer of Blue Turquoise by 1985. Discus farms farm other Southeast Asian countries came to buy fishes for breeding. None of these would have happened if I haven't purchased that Red Royal Blue pair in 1980 and the world's history of discus hybridization would also be a lot different.
Very soon after we were able to breed the imported discus, Rocky and I were having a big problem to house the rapidly increasing number of discus in our small apartments. We decided to combine our tanks and fishes together in late 1985. Very soon afterwards, we rented two small adjacent shops on the ground floor of Block 15, Tin Wan Estates, Tin Wan. I managed to squeeze 70 tanks into the tiny space of 35 square meters. I named our hatchery World Wide Fish Farm (abbreviated as WWFF). The Chinese name is 環球魚場.
We worked during the day and convened at night to care for the discus. Soon we were able to breed some good varities such as WB4 High Body Cobalt and WB8 Flach Cobalt (known locally as Wattley's Turquoise, 威利藍). We became famous. Many discus hobbyists visited us. Even Asia TV came to make a report of our tiny hatchery in a resettlement estate. Very soon exporters came to buuy big quanties of our discus. Discus breeding became a business; I decided to turn professional in 1986.
The Professional Years...專業年代...
ABOVE: My second hatchery in Wong Chuk Hang before the automations
We started to build a much larger second hatchery in late 1986 in response to the rapid increase in business. It had an area of about 180 square meters which was located on the 16th floor of the Derrick Industrial Building in Wong Chuk Hang , Hong Kong Island. I managed to put 100 breeding tanks and 200 raising tanks into this new hatchery but had to calculate everything very accurately in order to squeeze such a large number of aquaria into a not so big industrial unit.
Initially, there is no central filtration in the hatchery. Every tank has its own filter and heater. The temperature variation is 3-4 °C and pH values range from 4.6-7.2. A lot of time has to be spent every day to adjust the temperature and the pH of each tank as well as to clean hundreds of filters. There is really too much work for me and Rocky to manage 300 individual aquariums. After a short time I had to group all the tanks into systems equipped with central filtration based on information I learnt from Frank Hoff, Jr.
The lights are switched on and off at the appropriate times every day by a timer via an AC relay. There is an emergency generator which starts automatically during a power failure. These automations enable the farm to be operated by only three workers.
All went well in the hatchery until we were hit by the Discus Plague or Discus AIDS in early 1987. It was a new disease coming from angel fish farms in Singapore a few months ago. It soon spread to infect discus all over the world. The symptoms are very similar to a virus disease but the pathogen has not been found till now. After killing thousands of discus with wrong drugs, we found the cure. The discus eventually recovered after several months.
In late 1987 we decided to ship directly to Japan instead of having to go through a middleman in Hong Kong. All our customers responded very favorably. The business increased several times and we were very busy entertaining guests almost every week.
In order to ship the discus successfully for long distances, I had to learn how to pack them properly. It involved quite a bit of experimentations to achieve a survival rate of 99% after a 48 hours flight. We almost never had any DOA (dead on arrival) claims from customers in all later years.
The business was growing so fast we ran out of space again within a year. It was the time to build a bigger hatchery. We went back to Tin Wan to construct a 500 tank farm inside two adjacent units with a total area of 390 square meters on the 18th Floor of the newly completed Sun Ying Industrial Building.
ABOVE: My third hatchery in Tin Wan
The new farm was opened in October, 1998. Within two weeks, the president of Far East Enterprise, Mr. Inouye, went to see us with the proposal to organize a discus show next summer. We agreed and started immediately to breed and grow the discus for the event.
The event was going to take place in July 1989 and was called: Hong Kong Discus Fair '89. Mr. Inouye's original idea was to invite all leading HK breeders to participate but the plan did not work out. Far East's other major Hong Kong discus supplier closed his hatchery suddenly in early 1989. Other farms also backed out very soon. WWFF was the only farm left at the end. The show became literally: World Wide Fish Farm Discus Fair '89.
There were a total of 3,000 discus from 8 cm to adult size that had to be shipped to the show. How to bag them individually quickly enough in the very crowded conditions of our farm was a real challenge. The packing time we had was only twelve hours. We also had to net the discus out from the tank without damaging them. It was really necessary as there will be no time for them to recover in Japan: the show was to begin in less than 12 hours after their arrival. My solution is to tranquilize the discus in their own tank so that they can be put into the plastic bag without struggling. To avoid any damage to the fins by pH shock, the discus are also to be shipped with their own aquarium water. I ordered a kilograms of the tranquilizer MS 222 for the event. The MS 222 is made to a correct concentration and buffered to a pH of 6 so that one liter of the solution is sufficient to sedate the discus in a 200 liters aquarium. To minimize mistakes in identification, the fully labelled shipping bags and the styrofoam box or boxes are placed underneath the appropriate tank.
Rocky, I and eight helpers in two teams were able to finish packing the whole shipment in only 10 hours. We were lucky to be able to board the same Cathay Pacific CX 504 flight to Narita together with the 165 boxes of discus. As soon as the big transport truck arrived at the exhibition hall, the well-rehearsed Japanese team of three dozen people worked in an extremely coordinated manner to unpack the discus. All the fish were released into their designated tank in perfect condition in less than two hours.
This fair remains until now, the largest show for a single discus farm that has a total of 300 tanks and 3,000 discus. It was also held in a 1,000 square meters exhibition hall located in the center of Tokyo, the most expensive place in the world at that time.
After the show, World Wide Fish Farm was recognized as the world's leading producer of exotic discus.
ABOVE: Taiwanese magazine report
Our attention turned to Taiwan after having conquered Japan. Tropical fish business in the island reached its all time high even before Li Deng Hui became president in October, 1988. One afternoon in late September, we found an advertisement for the aquarium shop Crystal Palace in a Taiwanese tropical fish magazine. Rocky picks up the phone to call them out of curiosity. The owner, Mr. Zhang Kuan Hua is an uncomplicated, amiable man who welcomes us to Taiwan. He also gives us the contacts of Taiwan tropical fish importers.
In mid October Rocky and I were in Taipei City selling Discus. Tropical fish was very popular in Taiwan at that time. In an area inside the city, there were more than a hundred aquarium shops within an area of one kilometers. The value of tropical fish that Taiwan was importing has already exceeded Japan for a number of years. The trip was fruitful and we were shipping discus to the island a week later.
After we established business in Taiwan, we had to go there very often to teach our customers how to deal with the Discus Plague. We met Mr. Lau Kam Keung (劉監強) during one trip in early 1990. He is a gifted interior designer from Hong Kong who immigrated to Taipei City more than 10 years ago. He was always involved in the aquarium business ever since he was there. When aquatic plants became popular, he opened a shop Ya Qu (雅趣) that specialized in the planted aquarium. Mr. Lau is recognized as one of the few masters in this field.
Soon after we knew him, Mr. Lau succeeded to sell his shop to his customer, Mr. Chen Yi Zhong (陳怡中) who has been his customer since high school years. Mr. Chen comes from a rich banker family and had just returned to Taiwan after studying economics in a Japanese university. He had the ambition to expand the newly acquired shop into an enterprise. In no time, we signed a contract to make Mr. Chen our exclusive Taiwan importer. It was also agreed special retail shops have to be created to promote our discus.
Four large shops, the Turquoise Halls (松石廊) were built in the most prestigious neighborhoods in Taipei City within a year after the contract was signed. The flagship shop is a ultra modern, 150 square meters facility in Min Seng community which is located very close to Mr. Chen's head office. Other shops were opened in Zhong Xao, Da An and Tian Mu communities a few months later. They are so beautiful and the design is so modern that there were Japanese who went to Taipei City just to visit them.
ABOVE: The 1990 WWFF discus seminar at the Taipei Trade Center
I met Manfred Göbel for the first time in April, 1989 at the office of Far East Enterprise, Inc. in Narita City, Chiba Prefecture. Manfred and I have been communicating by letters and have even exchanged our best discus after we were introduced by Dr. Schmidt-Focke two years ago. We got along well. Manfred visited me many times both in Hong Kong and also in Taichung after we moved our business over there in 1997.
Marc came to Hong Kong in late 1989 looking for a better job. His father has closed the family's printing business a few months ago to retire in Florida. After losing his job since college, Marc was working at the tropical fish importers in New York but he was not happy. I told Marc that if he would sell my discus in the USA, he would get all the help from me. World Wide Fish Farm USA was formed in Manhattan, NY a few weeks later.
I organized a seminar at the Taipei Trade Center to promote our discus in 1990. I invited Manfred and Marc to share their knowledge with the Taiwanese. After the even, it was a week of feast and drinking; one of the few very enjoyable occasions in our lives.
In early 1990 I went to see Mr. Masao Kitano in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan to introduce our discus to him. His company, Marina Co., Ltd., was the biggest importer of Penang discus in Japan. We worked together to expand the discus business in Japan a hundred times in less that two years' time. We even had a dedicated magazine "Pitch-at" in the mid 1990s to promote our discus in the country.
ABOVE: Discus Certificate
We took a week off from our busy schedule at the farm to visit our German friends in July, 1990. We were joined by Marc at the Frankfurt Airport who arrived by a direct flight from NY. Manfred was our host. The next morning we went to see Dr. Schmidt-Focke. In exchange for a pair of WR27 Pink Fairy that I brought to the doctor, I was allowed to choose three half size discus from a community tank in his discus room. When matured, one of them was to become the mother of our famous WR25 Tangerine Dream strain. I also had the opportunity of meeting the doctor's wife Anneliese and his youngest daughter, the very beautiful Brita Schmidt-Focke.
ABOVE: Bad Homburg, July, 1990
During the following days, Manfred took us around to see other discus friends including Dieter Untergasser, Werner Konrad, Alfred Rieger, Gerhard Rahn, Willi Brockrothen and Hubert Kleijkers in the Netherlands. They are gentleman coming from all walks of life who breed discus for pleasure, not money. Dr. Schmidt-Focke. being the oldest and the most experienced, was their leader. I am really proud to have them as friends.
The week in Germany is one of the happiest times in my life. I can still remember the doctor took us to a tobacco shop in downtown Bad Bomburg where he bought the "life saving" active carbon filters for Marc and Rocky. While paying at the counter, the doctor was emphasizing that they must use them every time when smoking or else they are going to die young.
I believe Marc and Rocky were not enjoying their cigarettes at all in Bad Homburg. They stopped using the filter the moment that they left town. Manfred was laughing all the time inside the tobacco shop.
The party in Manfred's home was a really happy occasion. Jörg Schütz drove his big BMW motorcycle 400 km from Stuttgart to meet us. There were a dozen of us talking about discus well into the night, including the doctor. Manfred and his wife have prepared enough food to feed an army and there was so much wine which could easily fill up the koi pond in his backyard. Even Manfred's pair of gigantic dogs were also having a feast; everybody gave them pieces of steak and chicken. What a wonderful night.
I can still recall the funny expression on Rocky's face when he was complaining about the bread in our hotel. Every morning while we are having breakfast, he shows me his wounds in the mouth and exclaims it is the bread that makes him bleed. He asks repeatedly why German breads are baked so hard? It is really difficult to abstain from sniggering. I told him to eat slowly, just like our discus. Rocky is a loveable guy who never grows up.
ABOVE: Inside Doctor Schmidt Focke's Home
(Left to Right) Marc Weiss, Sunny Lo,
Dr. Schmidt Focke, Manfred Göbel
ABOVE: Bad Homburg City Center
(Left to Right) Marc Weiss, Brita Schmidt Focke
ABOVE: Inside Doctor Schmidt Focke's Home
(Left to Right) Rocky Ng, Sunny Lo,
Dr. Schmidt Focke, Manfred Göbel
The walk to the Heidelberg Castle was equally memorable. Despite the road being very steep and the four of us were all painting, we were still talking non-stop about discus all the way until we reached the castle...we were behaving just like children. The mug of cold beer at the castle's bar is only able to calm us down for a few minutes before we resumed discussing.
ABOVE: On the way to the Heidelburg Castle
The period between 1990 and 1996 was the most productive years in my whole discus career.
The first breakthrough in culture came in 1990 when Rocky unlocked the secret of artificial raising. Besides a tenfold increase in production, the process also stops parasite transmission occurring during natural breeding. Mass culture of discus without the use of medication became a reality. Artificial raising also makes it possible to breed strains that are impossible to reproduce naturally. These larvae are too weak to swim to the parents to feed when they become free swimming and are all starved to death within a day.
I did an experiment to study how water chemistry affects breeding. I built a very elaborate system by passing tap water first through micron filters to remove the suspended solids. The water was then forced through several stages to remove all the dissolved substances, consisting of active carbon reactors (pre and post carbon filtration), a reverse osmosis machine and ion exchangers (cation & anion). The final stage was to sterilize the water by ultra violet lamp.
ABOVE: Customer's Advertisement
The super-pure water was reconstituted with reagent grade minerals before use. The experiment was a complete failure. I was not able to breed a single discus in two months. All the eggs turned white within a few hours after they were spawned. The discus started to breed successfully in days when I switched back to tap water.
This spectacular failure tells me there are both measurable and unmeasurable parameters inside the aquarium affecting all the aquatic life forms of the tank. The inorganic, measurable criterion are the physical and chemical properties of water, such as dissolved substances, temperature and pH, ect. The other category are biochemical reactions occurring inside the body of a living organism that cannot be easily measured by instruments or tested by reagents. Whether an environment is suitable for discus and other aquatic organisms to survive depends on the correct interactions between the organic (unmeasurable) and inorganic (measurable) criterion.
The second endeavor to improve water quality was to construct a massive central filter for all the growth tanks. It was huge. The central vat was 15 meters long, 1.5 meters wide and 0.7 meters high. Water was pumped four meters high to trickle down through 20 layers of foam. It looked like the Niagara Falls when in operation. While it worked extremely well, I had to switch it off after a week. The filter was spraying too much water into the air, shorting out all the electrical circuits in the hatchery.
After two complete failures the third experiment was a resounding success.
In discus culture, the limiting factor in the aquarium is not swimming space but the amount of available oxygen. There is no more than 3 ppm of dissolved oxygen in the soft acidic water in our discus tank at the relative high temperature of 30°C. I consulted with Marc Weiss to find a solution. He told me there is a technology developed by the US government to supersaturate water with oxygen. The process is to force oxygen gas into water under pressure inside a small reactor to obtain a concentration as high as 20 ppm.
The oxygen systems were built as quickly as possible. The improvement was a 600% increase in holding capacity. We could grow as many as 600 discus from 2 cm to 6 cm inside a 100 liters aquarium in only five weeks. That is unbelievably fast.
Over the years I was constantly reminded by Dr. Schmidt-Focke to use wild discus for hybridization. In later 1993 Marc went to Manaus on the mission to find the wild discus sources in Brazil. The adventurous Marc was more than eager to go. He called me the day after arriving in Manaus to tell me all the exotic varieties were there by the thousands.
ABOVE: WWFF's Advertisement in the USA
The first shipment was sent to us in early December consisting of Red Turquoise type fishes from Novo Olinda do Norte, a small town on the lower Madeira River but most arrived frozen.
Marc and I went to Manaus in early January but it was too late. All the good specimens had been sold and we were told to come in autumn. We went back together with Manfred in early October. As soon as we walked into the hotel's restaurant for breakfast, we met Mr. Kitano. What a happy coincidence! He took us to visit all his suppliers. There were at least 50,000 best quality wild discus in Manaus at that time. Thanks to Mr. Kitano, he told all exporters he would buy every single wild discus that they could ship!
This trip was really fruitful. I was able to buy more than a thousand wild discus of such a high quality that were never available again in all the later years.
After the trip Marc went to Manus a few more times. Shipments of wild discus were imported again for another season.
I used the wild discus to study inheritance by breeding them with their own kind. Some crossbreedings were also performed. From these Amazonian gems I learned a lot about discus inheritance and have also developed 11 very beautiful strains from them.
By 1996 there were more than 30,000 discus in our farm which were incredibly beautiful. My 10 years of hard work have paid off well. What I achieved in a decade is more than the total output from all the other breeders in the world combined for the same period of time.
As early as 1995 I was planning to move the business to Taiwan. I went to different parts of the island bringing along with me water testing instruments to look for a suitable place whenever I had time. In 1996 I found an empty factory in Jiun Duu Village, a very small village in Shan Kang County about 15 km north of Taichung City. It is a three stories concrete building with a total area of 2,000 square meters which is ideal for building the farm. The tap water in the village is from a deep well. The water is free of pesticides, heavy metals and organic wastes. The lease contact was soon signed.
Construction of the farm took a year. Besides the design work, I also had to find and import heavy equipment from world sources such as boilers, emergency electric generators, oxygen machines etc. It is a really complex farm having a total of 800 tanks in 54 systems located on three floors. A very elaborate water supply network and a central heating system for the tanks were installed. Due to its size, the new hatchery is too expensive to be heated by electricity. I made a special trip to visit Manfred in 1995 to learn about central heating by the use of diesel boilers. The new farm was completed in February, 1997. It took more than a dozen shipments to fly the 10,000 discus over there. The business resumed on April 1st, 1997.
The water in our village has a conductivity of 350 μS cm-1 which is too hard for breeding. I had to build a very big reverse osmosis system for the 300 spawning tanks but the breeding result was never as good as in HK. Besides the water problem, the bloodworms in Taiwan were loaded with lots of toxins. There was also a lack of live shrimps and crab eggs which are essential for breeding delicate, inbred strains.
In the next eight years, nothing really new was coming out from this very big and modern farm although we were still producing a lot of discus. There are two reasons. Firstly, the breeding programs were only a continuation of the work that I began in HK. I could not find untried pairing combinations after working very hard in the previous year. Moreover, there is a limit to the variations that can be produced by gene recombinations. Secondly, there was a disaster in 1998. We were using tap water in the farm at that time. During one night the chlorine machine in the government water factory malfunctioned. An excessive amount of the gas was injected into the water. All the next generation broodstocks were dead when we went to the hatchery the next morning. Fortunately the pairs and some second grade adults were alive.
There was another disaster in the following year. This time it was a major earthquake. The 1999 Namtau Jiji earthquake measured 7.3 on the Richter scale at the epicenter which is only 80 km away from the farm. Despite being so close, the farm was safe even though half of the water in the tanks spilled out during the vigorous vibrations. Only one aquarium was broken. The emergency generator kept the life support systems going before electricity was available again several days later.
Before I found the building in Jiun Duu village, I had already signed the initial lease contract for a similar building in Fung Yuen County which is only 15 km away. For the absurd reason the heavy aquaria would eventually damage his building, the landlord revoked the lease contract. All the buildings on the whole street were completely destroyed by the earthquake.
We were not so lucky in breeding. The red spotted strains did not breed well in the new farm. We were only able to continue inbreeding them for another generation or two. By the year 2000, WR13, WW19LS, WR37, WR14, WR25-28, WR31 were extinct. We suffered similar losses in the blue strains. WB2-12, WB32-35, WB40 and SFB1 were also history at more or less the same time.
On the positive side, we were able to produce some exceptional specimens in the F2 generation of WW46 Flame of Forest. There were fishes having blood red spots inside a Marlboro Red body. The most extraordinary specimen has a network of fine reticulated turquoise stripes and red spots on the whole body. The good red hybrids are the WR52-60 strains which are larger than their ancestors to reach a maximum lenght of 17 cm at maturity.
The other interesting variety is the Snakeskin Discus. I was also able to get specimens from four totally different sources.
The only achievement in the blue category is the Blue Diamond type WB65 Celestial Cobalt Blue and WB66 Neon Cobalt Blue strains. They have better body form, higher finnage and deeper color than the pure WB22 Blue Diamond. WB65 and WB66 were developed without having been crossed with the original WB22 strain.
In early 2005 there was a new mysterious disease in the hatchery: an incurable fin rot in young discus.
Having devoted the best 25 years of my life to discus, working 12-13 hours a day and seven days a week, it is time to say goodbye.
During the last weeks of the farm, I opened the door to hobbyists in Taiwan. In the final few days, a young man named Leo Law came to buy discus. He came again several times in the following days to end up in buying all my fish. On the last day when the farm was still open, Leo came to tell me he was really interested in continuing my work. In a split second decision, I gave the farm to Leo and agreed to take him as my pupil.
Soon I was in America chasing my dream in audio.
