Did you know fantastic help is an anagram of Planet Catfish? This forum is for those of you with pictures of your catfish who are looking for help identifying them. There are many here to help and a firm ID is the first step towards keeping your catfish in the best conditions.
It is possibly a C130, but could be a C. loxozonas variant, they aver extremely variable with some specimens showing the diagonal band and others without. I would like to ask if you just have the single fish or is it part of a group, if so is it possible to show a picture of the group.
Firstly C. schwartzi according to the description should display a black dorsal spine as well as a small black shoulder blotch. There are a couple of pictures in the cat-elog under C. schwartzi that do not display the black in the dorsal, these could just be colour variations or possibly a new species. There are several other species, C. loxozonus and C. leucomelas are two species that show a tremendous amount of colour variation and with this in mind it is extremely difficult to determine an exact identification from one fish.
Thanks for clearing that up Ian. I have had a group of 6 (2 left) of what I thought were C. schwartzi that all had the white dorsal spine (exactly like the ones above). But, looking at the picture in the cat-elog of a large group shoaling in mid-water there seems to be a lot variation there, as far as i can make out. Does C. loxozonus not always have the distinctive black stripe running from the dorsal fin to the ventral lobe of the caudal?
I must admit that I have seen similar looking fish labelled for sale as C schwartzi in the UK and also saw them arrive mixed up with schwartzi in orders when I worked part time in the aquatic trade. I have also seen leucomelas, ornatus, ambiacus and melanistius mixed in as well. I remember one batch of 25 fish having 5 different species I could see.