OgreMkV
07-08-2007, 6:10 PM
I was disappointed by the last book and most of the books at Amazon looked to be very similar (and in price too). I saw this one for about 3x what the others where and since it's written by a PhD from Texas, I thought I'd give it a shot.
To sum up, 5 stars is you want a book describing almost every known Malawi cichlid with pictures (male and female) and a short description of trade names, habitat, breeding behavior, food, size and use of keeping.
3 stars as a book on fishkeeping.
One of the curious notes is that he goes into great length about how to make a useful filter out of a powerhead and big chunk of sponge and pretty much glosses over the entire concept of canister or HOB filters. I thought that was strange, but on reflection if this guy is like the marine biologist at Lamar, then he's got three labs with about 30 tanks each and a research budget about the size of my monthly salary.
Anyway, the book is a full color hardback with 208 pages. The fish descriptions start on page 52 and take the rest of the book except for a small index. Plenty of color pictures fill the book. It's very pretty. Each section of the fish descriptions starts with a few page introduction to the group... behavior, habitat, compatibility and the like.
There is also a section devoted to feeding of cichlids and another on diseases of cichlids (being a biologist he ignores the common name and calls it 'White Spot Disease'. A final section concerns the breeding of the cichlds.
My only complaint is that the actual information about keeping Malawi cichlids in an aquarium is rather short and he (of course) uses the specific name for every picture. That's fine, but I know very few petshops that use the specific names of these fish.
A good book, the non fishy part is quick to read and pretty well written. It makes a great Coffee Table book. Oh and Xander (my son) gives it two squeals and a drool factor of 4. ;)
To sum up, 5 stars is you want a book describing almost every known Malawi cichlid with pictures (male and female) and a short description of trade names, habitat, breeding behavior, food, size and use of keeping.
3 stars as a book on fishkeeping.
One of the curious notes is that he goes into great length about how to make a useful filter out of a powerhead and big chunk of sponge and pretty much glosses over the entire concept of canister or HOB filters. I thought that was strange, but on reflection if this guy is like the marine biologist at Lamar, then he's got three labs with about 30 tanks each and a research budget about the size of my monthly salary.
Anyway, the book is a full color hardback with 208 pages. The fish descriptions start on page 52 and take the rest of the book except for a small index. Plenty of color pictures fill the book. It's very pretty. Each section of the fish descriptions starts with a few page introduction to the group... behavior, habitat, compatibility and the like.
There is also a section devoted to feeding of cichlids and another on diseases of cichlids (being a biologist he ignores the common name and calls it 'White Spot Disease'. A final section concerns the breeding of the cichlds.
My only complaint is that the actual information about keeping Malawi cichlids in an aquarium is rather short and he (of course) uses the specific name for every picture. That's fine, but I know very few petshops that use the specific names of these fish.
A good book, the non fishy part is quick to read and pretty well written. It makes a great Coffee Table book. Oh and Xander (my son) gives it two squeals and a drool factor of 4. ;)