That's awesome Racoll! I am quite interested in their invasiveness. They are ALL OVER Florida.

Krista is a friend of mine. We collected fish together in Peru and have communicated quite a bit regarding loricariid biology.

Where are you working in Pterygoplichthys? They aren't in NZ are they?

Regarding whether loricariids consume the same foods among seasons (wet vs. dry), I think that stable isotopes help with this. The Panaque and H. pyrineusi I caught in Peru were slightly different; whereas the Panaque showed identical carbon and nitrogen signatures among their plasma proteins and ...

AS far as the sand thing goes... I do think its consumption is incidental. Pterygoplichthys in FL live in sandy, spring-fed rivers and feed on periphyton and other items (like inverts) from the surface of rocks and the river bed. They can't help but ingest sand as they ingest algae or worms from the ...

I agree about the composition of the food, but generous feeding of any type will cause fowling in a relatively short period of time (1-2 weeks). One thing I noticed in my experimental tanks is man, loricariids shit a ton, even when eating algae discs!

Nice synopsis, Milton! I didn't mean to give the perception that they ONLY feed on "soft" wood, because, as Nathan's data suggests, they certainly do some hard core reasping on harder substrates as well (especially Panaque cf. nigrolineatus "Marañon" and others in the P. nigro clade). But, if the ...

Hello, I thought I might jump in on this conversation, since it's about wood-eating catfishes. I have launched a "diatribe" response to the PFK interview. You can read it at http://pd.bio.uci.edu/ee/dgerman/PFK_response.html As Yann pointed out, there is a difference between "eating" and "digesting ...

I've read it. It is a great piece of work, and, because the stable isotope data jive with mine, I think it is even better. Plus, Nathan is just a cool guy.
Cheers,
Donovan