Rice & shine
Small, bright, peaceful and easy to breed. Could Oryzias woworae be the best aquarium project ever?
ON A RAINY and windy day—just like the one today when I’m writing this piece —having a fish-house is a real godsend. Knowing that I can leave behind the cold and damp weather even just for a short time and relocate somewhere nice and warm helps me to get through a difficult day. When I feel really under the weather, I always go to a tank which is full of life and flashy colours. The aquarium in question is the home of my group of Daisy’s ricefish, Oryzias woworae, a fish that will surely bring sparkling joy into your life, too.
I still vividly remember the hype that surrounded the discovery and the following market entry of this shiny blue ricefish. As you could expect everyone wanted to be among the first to keep and breed some, so the price was initially steep. Fortunately, the new, blue wonderfish did what every normal ricefish does: bred like rats. The resulting tide of fry pushed the prices down, so if you want to get hold of them today you won’t need to break the bank.
What’s a ricefish?
Most of you have like heard of ricefishes. The most famous of them, the Japanese ricefish, Oryzias latipes, otherwise known as the medaka, has even been sent up into space. Not only that, a group of ‘astronaut fish’ medaka not only survived the trip but even successfully bred in space—they’re pretty tough, but their extreme hardiness and adaptability are only some of the reasons for their huge popularity.
In fact, there is a recent resurgence in medaka keeping, with new, increasingly colourful strains emerging with regularity, in tandem with sometimes extortionate prices.
There are currently 34 species available within the Oryzias genus. As the scientific name (Oryza = rice) suggests, some of them can be found on rice fields, but their natural spread isn’t restricted to these flooded lands. Members of the genus can be found in a wide range of freshwater habitats, and some of them (like O. melastigma) occur in brackish waters.
Despite having a toothcarp appearance—at first glance they look like a killifish—they belong to the Beloniformes, the sister order of Cyprinodontiformes. Within this order there are five families, namely Adrianichthyidae (ricefishes), Belonidae (needlefishes), Scomberesocidae (sauries), Exocoetidae (flying fishes), and Hemiramphidae (halfbeaks). An intriguing an morphologically diverse bunch
