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.
julii and trilineatus... forever dilemma... when i try to ID them, i just look for 3 lines on the cory's body... primitive but sometimes effective...
julii was bred succesfully here in CRO, and i must say that price is very cheap now...around 4euros for fish...
Both species are variable in colour pattern making them extremely difficult to tell, although C. julii is quite compressed when viewed head on. The only certain way of telling is if you know where they were collected.
This topic seems to come up quite often, but if you had no way of knowing where they were collected, how would you tell them apart?
The point I am trying to make is whether or not one is a synonym of the other. I have cursorily gone through the literature, and it seems that their distinctiveness has been assumed (but not tested).
I registered here today to get the answer to this very question. C.julii or C.trilineatus? I thought I recently bought a C.julii, but maybe not. Will vertical lines extending up from the central horizontal line do me any good? My fish has them, as well as a bit of a reticulated pattern. It does not have a lot of spots, but some. I am beginning to think it may be a C.trilineatus.
C. trilineatus is a variable, well distributed fish. Even in a netful of half a dozen or so wild caught fish you can notice obvious differences in pattern that, if you saw them in a LFS, might make you think they were different.
C. julii is from north eastern Brazil and C. trilineatus is found throughout the amazon primarily exported from Peru but also from Brazil. Aparently their ranges overlap. Also, C. punctatus is another very similar species again. So even going on collection locality to start telling these fish apart is risky as Silurus points out, direct comparisions appear not to have been made.
The business about one having spots on the head and the other reticulations is aquatic myth I'm afraid.
What we really need someone to do is pop over to the coastal rivers in NE Brazil with a net and a digicam!
The current view is that unless we know exactly where they came from, it's C. trilineatus.