A summer flounder (~ 2 inches long) As the weather warms up, the aquarium department takes full advantage of our brief opportunities to catch all the saltwater fishes we will need until next year. Early summer is an excellent time to collect, not only because…
Below is a short video of the elusive candy darter, native to the New River drainage. Virginia has an excellent variety of native fishes primarily due to the diversity of aquatic habitats. Several large Chesapeake bay tributaries begin on the eastern slope of the Appalachians…
Today we removed the partition that separated the lined seahorse parents from their young and they mingled together for the first time. The partition protected the young from being sucked against or into the filter system. As the video shows, the juveniles are two different…
This video shows a pair of our many white catfish spawning. These two have fanned out a shallow depression underneath some woody debris with their tails. They perform a ritual where they swim in circles side by side until they eventually are ready to mate….
In the upcoming weeks, fellow Aquarist Jillian Swinford and I will hopefully get out for our first big collecting trip of the year to Merchants Millpond State Park in NC – about an hour and 20 minutes from the VLM. Merchants Millpond is part of…
Many of the fishes in our Mountain Stream exhibit have been displaying mating colors, but also have been actually mating. The video shows a small portion of the extended mating behaviors of our Roanoke logperch. In the foreground is a (presumably) gravid female and around…
These are juvenile brook trout in a side channel of the Tye River, approximately 200 yards downstream from Crabtree Falls. Native Virginia Brook trout spawn in late Fall, and take two to four months to hatch depending upon water temperature. After hatching, larval trout acquire…
This is the second installment of our “Video of the Week!”. This is a routine morning feeding of our tropical tank, but the most obvious focus is on the sinuous and ever-hungry engineer gobies Pholidichthys leucotaenia also called convict gobies or convict blennies. The nickname…
This is the first video of the new series, “Video of the Week”. It is a brief underwater tour of the Cypress Swamp Habitarium. Immediately you may notice a very…uh…healthy amelanistic channel catfish, then a pair of shy largemouth bass, and most prominently several longnose…
Northern California has a scope and scale that is difficult to absorb. It is only possible to experience in person what seems to be the edge of the world. Agate Beach, at Patrick’s Point SP named for the smooth, beautiful rocks found on the beach…