Vandellia cirrhosa info.

[CatWhat]

A rare import indeed but I was wondering if there has been any success keeping and feeding the Vandellia cirrhosa.

[CatWhat]

The only info I have been able to track down was people using Goldfish as hosts for the Vandellia cirrhosa and simply rotate the hosts on a regular basis.

[Viktor Jarikov]

From my little reading this is true that they cannot adapt to anything other than live hosts.

The practice of using live hosts perhaps could be barely justified for the highest of the exalted purposes like earnest research and education but for a layman purpose would probably be the epitome of animal cruelty. I think. I am not saying that this is your purpose at all or that you are considering it. Just thinking aloud with you.

[CatWhat]

Oh no certainly Viktor, I agree with you totally. It would be interesting to see but certainly flirting with some type of cruelty line.
Well the same I would assume could be placed on feeder fish as well.

[Bas Pels]

Oh no certainly Viktor, I agree with you totally. It would be interesting to see but certainly flirting with some type of cruelty line.
Well the same I would assume could be placed on feeder fish as well.

While there are some people fiercely against feeding live fish, I am not one of them. I think the difference is, when a fish is caught, it will be dead in an instance. Quite different to the situation when it is used to feed an external parasite.

But that is how I look at it, and other people are free to their own ethics.

[Viktor Jarikov]

While I am rather in the opposite camp to Bas's on live feeders, I am with him on the differentiation of the suffering. That is in fact why I said the "epitome".

[Lycosid]

I seriously doubt anyone has attempted to wean Vandellia off of live hosts. Finding even basic information on these fish is quite hard, and so unless there's a lot more research happening and either not being published or being published outside of the (English language) journals I have access to I'm going to guess that there aren't many people even trying to keep Vandellia species in captivity. Since a lot of research on V. cirrhosa focuses on blood-feeding there's an additional non-incentive to prevent them from feeding on live fish.

As to the ethical issues, I think this really comes down to the choice of feeder. Goldfish were chosen in many studies because they are cheap and lack effective defensive reflexes against V. cirrhosa. However, the photos I've seen showed ectoparasites longer than their hosts tearing their gills apart, necessitating long recovery times. The very fact that the goldfish needed to be rotated out tells you about how hard Vandellia feeding is on a goldfish. However, I don't need recovery time to feed one mosquito. It could bite me once every day and all I'd be is slightly annoyed. Problem is, who wants to raise monster fish just to keep a pencil-sized parasite that spends most of its day buried in the sand fed?

[Shane]

https://www.planetcatfish.com/shaneswor ... cle_id=301

This article was written in the early 90s. I used goldfish with a scale eating trichomycterid. I am not sure anyone has tried Vandellia.
-Shane

[Lycosid]

https://www.planetcatfish.com/shaneswor ... cle_id=301

This article was written in the early 90s. I used goldfish with a scale eating trichomycterid. I am not sure anyone has tried Vandellia.
-Shane

Spotte wrote what's probably the longest book on Vandellia (which he identifies as the candiru of legend, the subject of his book) and he reports on using goldfish as feeders for Vandellia in his own experiments. I feel like some of these experiments eventually made it into the peer-reviewed literature as well, but I can't say off the top of my head. I can go through my files and see, though, if this is of interest.