Blog

New Book!

Announcing the publication of my new book: Aquarium Fish Reproduction.  Scientific Studies of Guppies and Other Fish (2025).  The paperback is now “live” on Amazon.com.  (Should have an eBook version within a month.) Description below:

“Reference book for aquarium fish breeding. Recent studies using genotyping, mate choice tests, and artificial insemination have revealed exciting new insights into fish reproduction. This full-color book describes the nuances of fish mating behavior, such as mate choice copying, habituation, rare male advantage, and cryptic female choice. Hobbyists learn how to balance the perils and benefits of both inbreeding and outcrossing. Book material is supported by hundreds of citations to scientific papers. Author provides simple, easy-to-understand explanations for complex, scientific concepts and includes her own experiences as a long-time breeder of guppies and other aquarium fish.”

Outcrossing Guppies: The Rare Male Advantage

My new article ‘Outcrossing: The Rare Male Advantage’ discusses how the female guppy’s decided preference for novel males can help in outcrossing. Females quickly turn over paternity to new males rather than stored sperm from familiar males. Article discusses my successful outcrosses and the impressive scientific and experimental basis for the ‘The Rare Male Advantage’ in guppies. This subject has widespread implications for evolution, speciation, and maintaining genetic heterozygosity in natural populations.

Lyretail Males crossed with a Blue Grass female. Article shows results!

Video on Small Bowl Setup

Small bowls are a simple, inexpensive way of keeping aquarium plants and moving on to bigger things. A YouTube video (‘The Simplest Planted Aquarium With Diana Walstad’) shows the setup of 1-gal and 5-gal planted bowls. Lisa and John Hudson of KGTropicals (keepfishkeeping.com) made this happen. Video is a fantastic learning piece for those of you rightly intimidated by setting up aquascaped tanks, using soil in aquariums, or maintaining high-tech tanks. Photo shows me and Lisa with our bowls. She’s got the bigger one, but I’ve got three little ones. Not surprisingly, all bowls are doing great since setup!

Indexing Scientific Papers

Without my ‘Aquatic Ecology Subject Index’ (175 pages, available here), I never could have written Ecology of the Planted Aquarium.  From the 1990s onward, I subject-indexed every scientific paper I read.  Eventually, the index provided a framework for my book.  I enjoy reading scientific papers.  Many contain  interesting experiments and inspiring ideas.  Admittedly, the scientific jargon, conflicting nomenclature, and statistics can be daunting.  But these barriers can be breached by further investigation and being organized.  To be a scientist, you do not have to have a Ph.D., but you do need a love of science.

Me and Scientific Papers--all subject indexed.
Diana Walstad at the Filing Cabinet.  All Papers are Subject-indexed for Easy Retrieval.

NEW 4th EDITION has gone GLOBAL!

‘Ecology of the Planted Aquarium’ (4th Edition, 2023) is now available as an affordable paperback to hobbyists overseas (Britain, Italy, Japan, etc.), not just to those in the U.S. While there is a different–and maybe prettier– cover for Amazon-printed books, all BTPS-printed books, eBooks, and Amazon Kindles contain the same material. This is a long-awaited improvement, because shipping a printed book overseas is prohibitively expensive.

Amazon-Printed Paperback for 4th Edition (2023) of 'Ecology of the Planted Aquarium'
Amazon’s Cover for Fourth Edition (April, 2023)