It's been a while since I first starting this thread back in 2012 after DNA sequencing a common Ancistrus and trying to put a name on it ... Little has happened since then, but the genetic databases have been slowly filling up with wild caught material. I hoped that, one day, someone in South ...

There's no shortage of bagrids here in London. You're welcome any time!

Jools wrote:A family store, haven't been in over a decade.

Neither had I until I went in recently. It's EXACTLY the same.

Proper old-school style shop, but still got some tasty fish, especially in the nano tanks. !

Looks similar to this one I got from Upper Rio Negro:

Jools wrote: ↑08 Dec 2022, 11:34 PS Here's a video of an old set-up of mine with discus and plecos etc. Ran that for about 6 years.

Those were my discus! Great to see them

They decided to do it in an floating oak cave that wasn't waterlogged yet instead of the many more suitable options on the tank floor

For what it's worth, in nature, the wood-dwelling loricariids such as Panaqolus and Ancistrus are more than happy to cave in floating logs.

I was told the thing is Apistogramma in the Amazon area live in small creeks, under the trees. That is, they never see sun, and therefore the water never gets to 30 C A mile away the situation can be quite different, no trees, lots of sun - and no Apistogramma There are always exceptions of course ...

For the people who actually went to collect plecos what was your first experience like? My collecting trips were as part of a scientific research group, so all the logistics had been arranged and we had all the required gear. This made it a fantastic experience, but even then on multiple occasions ...

Congratulations Narelle! Kevin's a great guy. You'll have an awesome time.

PlanetCatfish is the main reason I got into ichthyology, and I think probably the same for a few others too, like Milton.

Jools has a lot to answer for

@racoll, do you expect your Negro fish are the same? Or slightly different (you mentioned the presence/absence of the black seam on dorsal fin of Negro fish)? I suppose if the Orinoco fish are lunaorum, then yours are different. And do you know anything about L158? I'm leaning towards your fish ...

This is strange, as that place is quite a well explored area in terms of these fishes. The descriptions of debilittera, contradens, lunaorum, furunculus all were made from material specifically collected in the area, so seems strange that something different like this would not be uncovered. My ...

You can find somewhat zombies in the lower Rio Negro (some somewhat spotty), so it would not surprise me that there's a similar fish in the Orinoco system. But that area is pretty well explored ... where exactly is Patacame?

It appears to aggregate a lot of different sources but does not validate the information. Still, at least, you could track down the papers it cites from. I suspect they're directly from museum collections or via GBIF rather than from papers, now that these collections data are easily available in ...

Kottelat & Freyhof (2007; native range red, introduced range green): Netherlands is Lower Rhine, so native to Netherlands

Yes, definitely !

Cripes, such an easy mistake to make. Sorry to hear about the fish. Make sure as many people hear about this as possible. I also find it hard to believe that it's the ethanol, as there will only minute amounts left on the hands after they are are dried, and I doubt it's that toxic in such small ...

Hey Jools,

PDF (crappy quality, massive file size) has been added to the Loricariidae share folder. Enjoy!

It looks like <"it is another one for ">, @racoll's", <"Spreadsheet of shame">. :) Presumably one could check the Genbank accession numbers of the comparative sequences to see if those have been correctly identified. They look legit. I checked COI and 12S. Wild caught vouchers from Panama. I ...

Hey Marc! Those Amphilius I got at Pier at the CSG meeting are fantastic, so I thoroughly recommend them if you can find any. They're incredibly lively and go absolutely mental if they smell any food. Main problem with African fishes, as you know, is actually finding them in the shops. Only option ...

Great to catch up with everyone! Thanks Mark and the other organisers.

Hopefully we'll all still be around for next year.

I did my best to panic-buy a lot of catfish

Anyone got a copy?

Jools wrote:Minor point, but you need to rename the download with a .pdf extension to be readily readable.

Thanks for spotting that Jools. Link is now fixed.

Might be of interest ...

Novak et al. 2020. Modern ornamental aquaculture in Europe: early history of freshwater fish imports. Reviews in Aquaculture. DOI: 10.1111/raq.12421.

PDF here.

No, but there really should be ... In its place I have a "spreadsheet of shame" that I use to filter out any undesirable sequences before I use them. Problem is it needs manually updating and that takes work :( Some of my favourites are: Solea solea identified as Xiphias gladius Thunnus identifed as ...

I don't mind them publishing papers that nobody will read, but when put this crappy data on public databases, it really bothers me. This one , apparently "Tatia intermedia", is actually a goldfish! See https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE=Nucleotides&PROGRAM=blastn&QUERY=MK078120.1&DATABASE ...

Making phylogenetic assumptions based on a small amount of data can likewise be very misleading. With a small amount of data those incorrect relationships tend not to be well supported, and so the gut feeling is that with more data they will be resolved. They often are resolved with 100% support ...

It's increasingly common now to use entire genomes for phylogenetic reconstructions. But what always staggers me is how well the crappy old methods can still perform. Take the recent loricariid phylogeny by Roxo et al. (2019) using 328,330 bp of ultraconserved element DNA ... I get much the same ...

Aren't the specimens ID'd as A. aguaboensis problematic also?

Haha, yes.

In short, it maybe is time to re-introduce "Ancistrus sp(3)" Remember this thread ? Sadly very few additional Ancistrus DNA barcodes have been publicly uploaded since 2012, but I ran the analysis again to see if anything has changed. We do now have some trade samples from both South Africa and ...

bekateen wrote:Considering this is the third article a cory mitochondrial genome, it seems that some lab got a new toy! (a next-gen sequencer)!

Why publish one paper when you can publish ten?! Just gaming the system, unfortunately, and not adding much value.