New Pickups.. Synodontis Ornatipinnis? pictures

[sazzy]

hey guys, fell in love and picked this guy up on sunday.. he was unlabeled and the bloke didnt have a clue other than a stripey Syno lol..so ive been told it maybe an Ornatipinnis?? id say he is roughly 4" he is so stunning



i went back this afternoon, and bought the rest X1 3" and x2 2"


this ones fins ive noticed are spotty not stripey?




thanx for any help

[Silurus]

I'm afraid this is another hybrid.

[Marc van Arc]

A hybrid, yes, but a very nice one. I can certainly see why you fell for them. I would have been tempted myself.

[Birger]

It would be interesting to see what kind of final size you get out of these...let us know in the future

[Richard B]

I've seen these in vast quantities in the midlands - about the best looking hybrid out there

[andywoolloo]

they are very beautiful little things! And I love your moss balls!

[alga]

O.K, so most think its a hybrid...what makes you think so? Looks a lot, to my untrained eye, that these at least come close to matching S. ornatipinnis? Just curious...either way nice fish.

[worton[pl]]

Hey,

well not so long ago I had similar question .

Check out this topic.

http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/view ... &sk=t&sd=a

you photos are far better than mine .

People were not so sure about my fish but looking at your pictures - mine is still much smaller than yours.
I guess it is good to wait some time and see what they develop into after a year or so ;).
Anyway it is great looking syno

[MatsP]

O.K, so most think its a hybrid...what makes you think so? Looks a lot, to my untrained eye, that these at least come close to matching S. ornatipinnis? Just curious...either way nice fish.

That is the trouble with hybrids - one of the parents almost certainly IS ornatipinnis. The other parent is some other species, making it look somewhat half-way between the genuine species and something else.

Silurus (HeokHee Ng is his real name) is a professional fish researcher that specializes in catfish, and he has written a couple of papers on Mochokidae [that's the family that Synodontis belong to], and many other papers [www.fishbase.org lists nearly 100 papers with H.H. Ng as one of the authors, if you list author names starting with N].

I think I can use the fingers on my right hand to count the number of times where he's been wrong on the ID of a fish. It happens, but not often.

--
Mats

[scotcat]

What gives it away basically is that the head pattern is so totally different from the rest of the body instead of a gradual coming together of the patterns. Nice Syno though

[Richard B]

O.K, so most think its a hybrid...what makes you think so? Looks a lot, to my untrained eye, that these at least come close to matching S. ornatipinnis? Just curious...either way nice fish.

Ornatipinnis is quite a rare species & therefore commands a high price. I have seen this hybrid at 4 different outlets recently & they were not expensive. One place had a tank of 30+ individuals. That same place had 3 other hybrid varieties. Stock, price & availability add up to hybrid & then there is the pattern etc also mentioned in posts above.

[Carp37]

Silurus also wrote this article for Planet Catfish on spotting hybrid synos:
http://www.planetcatfish.com/shanesworl ... cle_id=269

[sazzy]

Just letting you know that one (spotty fins) looks different to the first one and the little two
Also these are fish from a private collection, sold to the shop i got them from.

How much would i expect to pay for these, properly priced at a shop?

[MatsP]

Just letting you know that one (spotty fins) looks different to the first one and the little two
Also these are fish from a private collection, sold to the shop i got them from.

How much would i expect to pay for these, properly priced at a shop?

That is a really hard question. Whilst these fish are beautiful, I personally do not like hybrids of any form, so I personally would not pay anything at all. But someone else, with a different standing towards hybrids may well be willing to pay a fair amount (e.g. £5-20 (US$10-40) for a depending on size).

As it's often said "the value of something is what someone else is willing to pay for it".

--
Mats

[Richard B]

Silurus also wrote this article for Planet Catfish on spotting hybrid synos:
http://www.planetcatfish.com/shanesworl ... cle_id=269

It's a good starter but with new strains/mixes it gets more difficult all the time - the final paragraph is the best advice

"One final caveat is the fact that because so there are so many Synodontis species that can be hybridized, there is no hard and fast rule to identifying a hybrid. The features discussed above can help in identifying most of the hybrids presently in the market, but ultimately, it takes a fair amount of experience with Synodontis to be able to tell if you a truly dealing with a hybrid. My final advice is that if the Synodontis at the store does not look quite right, it is safer to assume that it is a hybrid than to purchase a fish that you may not want to care for."

[Dave Rinaldo]

Are all the pics for

Synodontis ornatipinnis

in the Cat-eLog "real"?

[MatsP]

Are all the pics for

Synodontis ornatipinnis

in the Cat-eLog "real"?

That is another of those "good question" moments. I have no idea myself. There are some that look pretty close to the fish posted here, whilst others are more different.

--
Mats

[Silurus]

I think that almost all (maybe all?) of the pics on the Cat-eLog are not S. ornatipinnis, if you examine the figures in Poll carefully. In almost all the cases, the humeral process and adipose fins are the wrong shape/size. The branching on the mandibular barbels also seems wrong to me and the illustrations in Poll show a fish without any markings on the head.

The problem with this species is that everyone associates it with the banded color pattern, but this banded pattern is actually the juvenile color (the adults are apparently spotted, not banded). What confounds the issue is that a number of other species might also have a “wavy” banded pattern when young.

[racoll]

Silurus, is the image of S. ornatipinnis in Kobayagawa (1991) authentic?

Surely this image pre-dates hybrids, or is it a different species?

[MatsP]

There is a picture in Baensch Aquarium Atlas Vol 2. 2nd Ed. as well, which is over 10 years old by now.

The main difference between both of those pictures (Kobayagawa and Baensch) is that the head pattern is irregular spots, not the vermiculated (sp?) pattern that the fish here show. There is a mixture of both spots and vermiculated heads in the Cat-eLog. Another difference with the fish in this post is that they have a spotted tail, whilst both of the pictures in the older books show a striped tail.

--
Mats

[Silurus]

Like the pattern on the body, the stripes on the caudal fin tend to break up into spots when the fish ages (or at least that is the impression I get from Poll).

[Kampfer]

Hi..good thread.Newbie here.i would to share one picture of my fish which i have.It's head looks like the "deform" head fish picture in PC catelog of S.Ornatipinnis.

[Mike_Noren]

I've sometimes wondered if only pictures of wild-caught Synodontis with known capture locality should be added to the Cat-elog, as nearly all captive-bred fish sold (at least around here) appear to be hybrids.

Anyway, there must be museum people here - don't you guys have any ornatipinnis with known capture locality in your collections? Possibly with online photo?

[Richard B]

I think pic 1 in cat-e-log (which was used in Sands CotW) is a genuine juvenille. A different photo in Sands CotW shows an adult with the spotted patterning. Other cat-e-log photos are dubious in ID IMHO.

[MatsP]

I have found the museum holding the Lectotype of S. ornatipinnis, MRAC (Africamuseum in Tervuren - Belgium), and I'm sending an e-mail to the person responsible to for the Ichtyological collection. Hopefully, I can get an answer relatively quickly - but only time will tell.

Update: the person responsible is out of the office "most of september", so we may not get a response for a while.

Update 2: I checked http://acsi.acnatsci.org/base/index.html, which has photos of many species, but not this one.

--
Mats

[Silurus]

Isn't the lectotype illustrated in Poll?



The juvenile in Poll for good measure.

[Birger]

Isn't the lectotype illustrated in Poll?

That is what I thought as well.

I've sometimes wondered if only pictures of wild-caught Synodontis with known capture locality should be added to the Cat-elog, as nearly all captive-bred fish sold (at least around here) appear to be hybrids.

I think the whole hybrid thing has really made us take a second look at the fish we do have or generated new interest from people who had no interest in them before, also like any large group of fishes it's identitifications will be questioned, names changed etc. it is an ongoing project.The hybrids just really throw a wrench into things. So far pleco people have not had to deal with this too much but unfortunately I have even seen the H word used in posts about pleco's lately...

Birger

[MatsP]

It would still be nice to have a photo of the specimen itself, rather than a drawing. (And I don't have a huge scientific library near to me, so I can't look up Poll's work as immediately as you can!)

--
Mats

[racoll]

The paralectotypes are in the BMNH. I shall see if I can get a photo tomorrow.

[Jools]

The paralectotypes are in the BMNH. I shall see if I can get a photo tomorrow.

Top work,

Jools