The plus side to this is that it gives me a natural division to be able to breeding native fish species in.
My short term goal is to popularize and provide native fish to the aquarium world by maintaining and propagating a few select species. A longer term goal is to start a selective breeding program and get some good strains going as well, but that's an obvious long term effort.
So I have this setup (still working on it, but will be complete soon), as well as around 3 dozen smaller tanks indoors to work out of.
So my question is, what species would you recommend? I enjoy caring for pygmy sunfish, and I know I can maintain a population indoors, but outdoors?
My other hangup is what kind of species I can mix together and still maintain/generate the population. I'm thinking least killies and pygmy sunfish will work fine. Pygmy killies should also, right? I don't know how predatory they are.
I'm not going to bother with Gambusia.
I'll most likely try to get a good colony of fundulus cingulatus.
I love enneacanthus sp. and would absolutely love to get a group of blackbanded to maintain and breed, but that's probably more of a pipe dream due to their scarcity. Bluespotted are fairly common here, though. I also like dollar sunfish and orangespotted sunfish, but all of the sunfish are going to likely be in tanks where they can spawn in peace and I may just use the outside containers as growouts.
I can most likely overwinter most species outside as long as I run a heater during the really cold snaps that we sometimes have. They aren't for more than a few days at a time so it's pretty manageable.
As you can probably tell, I have a million ideas going on, so any input or advice is welcome!
Work in progress!