is this a Sturisoma species?

[gibbus]

Hi can you help me ID my catfish?
He/she is around inches long.



thanks!

[Bas Pels]

Looks like a Sturiosoma to me.

You omitted filling in its length, but I'd assume it has a bodylength (that is, withoud tailfin) of 15 cm (6 inches) or less. To me, that is too little to say anything about he or she

[apistomaster]

Looks like Sturisoma aureum to me.
Here are some of my old breeding stock and they appear to be the same fish. L333 in background.

Male with spawn.

Six month old juveniles with young Apistogramma cacatuoides.

[gibbus]

oops. he/she is 4inches excluding the tail.

Sturisoma aureum really looks similar. At least now I have an idea, he/she was sold to me as a farlowella species

[MatsP]

It is absolutely not a Farlowella species, although I have seen them with "weird" names sometimes.

As to differentiating the different Sturisoma species, you need someone who really knows what they are talking about to tell the difference, and if they are tank-bred, they may even be hybrids, as they are known to crossbreed naturally if different species are kept in the same tank.

--
Mats

[aledk85]

S. festivum

[apistomaster]

S. festivum

This is a Maricaibo basin species from Venezuela. No fish are being commercially exported from that part of Venezuela.
Very few fish are exported from Venezuela legally. This is a difficult place for a fish exporter to make a living. Only fishes from the shared border formed by the Orinoco have any chance of being caught on the border or smuggled out of Venezuela. Nothing makes it out of the Maricaibo Basin without a dispensation from Sr. Presidente' Chavez. The only fish recently from there was the collection made by Oliver Lucanus, http://www.belowwater.com who was able to bring in the first real Panaque suttonorum in many years. ~$800 each. Should give you an idea how few fish come from that part of the country.
Almost all wild Sturisoma on the market are Colombian in origin. These are S. aureum. Very few exceptions. So few that if it looks like a S. aureum, swims like S. aureum and isn't terribly expensive, it is a Sturisoma aureum.
I doubt that many hybrids exist in the trade with the possible exception of L10a whose origins have been obscured. It is hard enough to raise any of these to a size large enough to be somewhat new owner idiot proof let alone complicating it by introducing hybrids.

[aledk85]

i don't know.....
here in denmark you can find in some place specialize for "special fish"...you can have aureum but also festivum and they come from breeding place or wild....

[apistomaster]

Using inductive reasoning to compare Denmark's ornamental fish trade to that of the wider world is bound to run into difficulties.

[aledk85]

the variety in Denmark is very wide,
if you have the passion and interest, you just have to know where to look

[alenate]

It`s not S.festivum.Here is a pic to of Festivum.

[Line]

Hello

And I have S. Festivum too and several others own them too. They are quite easy to id when they are fully grown - since they on all fins have the long filaments.

http://www.welse.net/SEITEN/sturallg.htm

Best regards
Line

[MatsP]

I strongly believe the point that Larry is making is correct. We've had this discussion quite a bit on Planet Catfish. Shane Linder (that is "Shane" in "Shane's world") was living in Venezuela and Colombia for a few years in the last decades. He is fairly familiar with the wild fish export from these countries. If he states that "No fish are comming out of the Maracaibo basin - and we would know if they did", then I tend to believe that is true. The Maracaibo basin is also isolated from other drainages in the South American continent, so it's unlikely that fish from that basin occurs in other basins.

So, if you find wild caught S. festivum, we can with a good probability say that it is NOT S. festivum. However, it may well be an undescribed species that looks very similar. This is not unusual - we get "Ancistrus temminckii" from Colombia, which is just about 2000 miles from where it's wild habitat is.

--
Mats

[aledk85]

aniway...i agree with you these sturisoma in this topic is not festivum, don't have long fin

for the S.festivum here in denmark i don't know rea i have seen.....i had strange fish, now i still have one of the long fish(l.paradoxa 60 cm)also my friend outside in the artificial warm-lake they had arapaima gigas bought without problem....but stop to speak about this i don't want to invade GIBBUS topic
bye

[MatsP]

Yes, we shouldn't invade others topics, but I just wanted to add that Arapaima gigas is sometimes captive bred for food - it may well be from this that the species arrives in Denmark - just like many Pangasius are available in fish-shops as a side-effect of food-fish production (bag up a few hundred fingerlings and sell them for 10p each to the fish-trade, who then eventually sells them to unsuspecting aquarists...)

--
Mats

[Cattleya]

Hi

This is a Maricaibo basin species from Venezuela. No fish are being commercially exported from that part of Venezuela.

after Chavez => no export from the Maracaibo basin. Right !

but
there was a time before Chavez.

Udo

[Bas Pels]

before chavez the opinions were pretty much alike in Venezuela - as far as I was told

thus, very little came out of the country before

[MatsP]

before chavez the opinions were pretty much alike in Venezuela - as far as I was told

thus, very little came out of the country before

Yes, I believe similar rules have been in effect in Venezuela for quite a few years. Venezuela has oil, so there's absolutely no need for the government to sell other natural resources to get rich.

--
Mats

[Shane]

Mats and Larry are correct to the best of my knowledge. There is a long-fin Sturisoma sp that has been the hobby several years (see Alenate's pic above). It has been commonly identified as S. festivum, but this is almost surely an incorrect identification. I have no idea when the S. festivum "tag" became associated with this fish but I am sure a little research would turn up the answer in an older hobby book.
There are many undescribed Sturisoma spp out there, and only 14 described, so it is difficult to know if the hobby's common "long fin" is an already described sp or something that has yet to be described.
Evers and Seidel used the identification S. festivum in Wels Atlas I primarily based on the photo that appeared in Galvis, Mojica, and Camargo (1997). The photo does agree well with what we call S. festivum in the hobby, unfortunately there is a problem. Some of the fishes in the 1997 work were collected in the Catatumbo, but it is also clear that some were pictures taken of fishes at exporters or retailers in Colombia. Is the fish in the book something they actually collected in the Catatumbo or something they photographed at a Bogota exporter? The photo in the book of Panaque suttonorum is actually a pic of P. cochliodon for example.
As to the point made above that fishes were exported from Venezuela, it is true but does not solve the problem as 1) even when there were Venezuelan exports they did not come from Maracaibo and 2) "long fin" Sturisoma are still being exported in large numbers.
-Shane

[apistomaster]

A very similar form of confusion arose among wild discus fanciers claiming places of origin but not actually personally having collected these discus; they merely go to Turky's or other exporter in Manaus, photograph different discus and assigning names perhaps based on a collector's say so. Well, all fisherman lie about where their best fishing spots are so it is foolish to trust in their information.
The only reliable source of discus types by location are cataloged in Heiko Bleher's book, Bleher's Discus Vol. 1. Heiko does not even give away ALL of his knowledge about some discus sources. He has invited me to collect with him at places others do not know of or go to but that doesn't mean I would necessarily be able to bring any back because of Brazilian regulations.

As a serious trout fly fisherman, I sure don't tell where I have my best fishing. At least not down to the specifics. I'll say I caught them in North Central Washington in Okanogan County but it is a large county with hundreds of lakes and many good trout rivers. It took me years of exploration and a stint of living there to discover places only the local cognoscenti are aware of. I'll refer to a region like Okanogan County but
it encompasses 5315 square miles, known for good fishing but only a few know the locations of the best few hundred acres of the top producing waters.