The Swedish and German versions of this site will soon be online! Who am I? My name is Wim, 27, and I have a problem: A hobby that got out of hand! I have been a big fan of aquaria for a long time. At the moment I keep Malawi cichlids, some Lnumbers and 22 stingrays. My occupations is programmer (automation), and after work, most of my time goes to our aquaria.

Cichlids from Lake Malawi

I lived in South Africa for 8 years, and 4 years in Namibia. I fished a lot over there, and caught a lot of fish that have similar looks as the Malawi cichlids. When I came back to Holland, I (ofcourse) had to have an aquarium. This first was one tank (100*40*40cm) with Mbuna's, but this soon became two tanks.
Because I lived in a small appartment before, I couldn't expand the hobby yet. Once I graduated and moved to a larger house, with enough room for a larger tank and also the larger Malawi cichlids, I decided to build a larger tank. This was the first tank I ever built, and after that many folloewd.

South American freshwater stingrays

When I had just started with the aquariumhobby, I had already spotted stingrays at a friend's place. These were P14's, and I never stopped thinking about them. Untill I saw an ad on the internet from Osnabrülck Zoo, that their Brazilian Motoro female had just given birth to a couple of pups, who needed a new home. Without any doubt I got in the car and picked up my first two stingrays. Within 1,5 year we expanded to five species, in total 22 stingrays.

Why breed?

Because I have to look very hard, and drive very far to get the rare predatory Malawi cichlids, I believe its a nice contribution to the hobby to make these rare species available for all, and against normal prices. Besides these rare species, I also keep other predators, Utaka's and some Mbuna species. As soon as we have some more room, I also hope to start breeding with other (besides predatory) rare species.
At the moment I am still constructing our hatchery. Hopefully we will expand it with even more tanks in the near future. I make all my tanks and filters myself, so it may take some time. The current number of tanks in our house got stuck at 16. In the near future I hope to build a large breedingshed, containing about 100,000 liters of water. At this moment it's "only" 8,000.