A VISUAL GUIDE TO THE SNAKEHEADS
Solitary, sturdy, and surprisingly personable, snakeheads have a small but devotional following in the UK. Here’s a look at some of the species you might (and one you shouldn’t) meet on your travels.
Solitary, sturdy, and surprisingly personable, snakeheads have a small but devotional following in the UK. Here’s a look at some of the species you might (and one you shouldn’t) meet on your travels.
IN SOME circles the snakeheads are the perfect predatory fish. They tick all the right boxes for someone hoping to impress visitors — the prowling hunting style, the shiny teeth, the gaping mouths and the constant willingness to put on a show of eating. They’ll take food straight from a reckless aquarist’s fingers (highly unrecommended) and they’ll even launch clean from the water in pursuit of a meaty snack. They’re easy fish to keep badly, but not really that much harder to keep well. With many species the trick is to forget one of the age-old constants of tropical fishkeeping — a persistent and unchanging high water temperature. Plenty of snakeheads are subject to seasonal change, something that should be recreated at home if you want to avoid fat, lethargic and short-lived fish. Warm summers and cooler winters, that’s the key. Snakehead keepers will quickly attest to the benefits of lazy keeping, too, if you listen to them. These are largely swamp fish, and happy to live a swampy life. Indeed, some of the notable keepers adhere to infrequent water changes, just a few times a year, and only then to recreate a rainy season. Outside of that, heavily planted tanks (the heavier the better) will work wonders at keeping nuisance nitrate and phosphate locked up.
The major downside is that if you’re keeping snakeheads, then by and large you’re only keeping snakeheads. For one, not many fish will put up with a seasonal shift in temperature and neglect of water changing. For another, snakeheads have a tendency to eat anything that fits in their mouths, and attempt the stuff that doesn’t. These are fish to keep in pairs, but in doing so it’s highly likely that they’ll settle and spawn. Of course, getting rid of the fry isn’t always easy — on more than a few visits to snakehead keepers, they’ve tried to offload some surplus young on to me — but there’s something about the ancient, hardwired parental instincts of the adults that can make it all worthwhile. Oh, and you won’t necessarily need a giant tank. There’s a growing range of dwarf snakeheads on the market now, such as the aptly named Rainbow snakehead, Channa bleheri. While a 120cm tank isn’t exactly nano, it’s not colossal either, and would happily fit this smaller species. But at the other end of the scale there are those you might want to avoid altogether, behemoths like the Giant snakehead — the clue’s in the name. Reaching over a metre long as adults, these are fish for the public aquarium. Shop carefully.