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About Us David P. Soares, born 1952, has been keeping tropical fish for about forty years now. For the last 19 or so he has been keeping the Dwarfs from South America and Africa exclusively. He is the active have of Soft Water Dwarf Cichlids hatchery in the US. This is the half that does the keeping and breeding. The other half is the “new species collector” and brain.
In the last twelve years David has been keeping these little guys he has managed to spawn about 80 different species of Apistogramma.
David always wanted to build a large hatchery and when he moved into his current residence in Sisters, Oregon, he had the chance to realize his dream. So he converted his garage into a 900 sq. foot hatchery. When he hooked up with Uwe he also acquired a purpose for the hatchery, and at that moment Soft Water Dwarf Cichlids was born. Several publications were the product of their co-operation too.
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When in March 1995 David and Uwe Römer met for the first time, they had a very special reason to risk their lives and drive through the total “White-Out” uphills the Cascade Mountains: Apistogramma!
Uwe was working at his PhD about Apistogramma at that time and wanted to “collect” some - then new - Apistogramma cf. juruensis in Oregon at David´s house.
David, the man from the mountains, was a skilled hobbyist especially interrested in maintaining and breeding the same group of Neotropical Dwarf Cichlids. The whole “expedtion” was a real big success, as this ended in their first intercontinental fish-exchange and a couple of follow-up publications in different countries. This was the start for a permanent and efficient contact: Numerous visits of Dave in Germany and Uwe in the US followed. Finally it lead the friends, meanwhile called the “Apistogramma-Idiots” by some of their friends, to found an American-German joint venture which they named Soft Water Dwarf Cichlids (SWDC).
Soft Water Dwarf Cichlids is running two main businesses: a fish hatchery and a book store to bring both to interrested aquarists.
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The book store offers Cichlid Atlases 1 and 2 - the Natural History of Neotropical Dwarf Cichlids -, but also all available english language books of Mergus-Publishers, well known to most aquarists in the US and Canada as Baensch´s Books.
The hatchery is especially designed to spawn Neotropical Dwarf Cichlids, that shall be mainly delivered to interested aquarists and other ”Apistogramma-Idiots” within the USA and Canada, but are shipped wordldwide meanwhile. Fishes from the hatchery placed in Oregon are regularely “updated” and contain some rare species and color forms of Apistogramma seldomly exported from the Neotropics and only exceptionally distributed in North America.
The “Apistogramma-Idiots” hope to make all these wonderful little fish available and affordable for everyone who keeps an aquarium.
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