Listing species by country

Icthician · Post by **Icthician** » 06 Jan 2005, 22:03

Would it be possible to list the catfish species by the country from which they originate in the catalog pull down?

A lot of the species don't have much or any information at all. The most basic information that is the most valuable to me is from what country a fish comes from and how big it will get.

Thanks,
Francine

Post by **Shane** » 07 Jan 2005, 13:47

Hi Francine!
This would be very hard to do for many reasons:
1) Fishes inhabit watershed and are not restricted by political boundries. Therefore do we list a fish from the Orinoco as Brazilian, Colombian or Venezuelan? If we list all the countries a watershed encompasses, the list soon becomes meaningless.
2) There is very little "range" type information done on fishes. Most species are described from a single holotype taken from a single location. If we quote the holotype location, we are just giving a very general idea because the holotype may have been collected at the far edge of the specie's range.
3) There are many, many incorrect identifications in scientific papers. Take a look on Fishbase and you will see reports of the same fish being known only from say Panama and Paraguay. Since this would be basically impossible given the distance how do we know which records are correct and which are misidentifications?
4) Knowing the country does not tell you much as many different types of water occur in every country. E.G. Chaetostoma milesi and L 52 are both "Colombian" but C. milesi is found at an elevation of several thousand feet living in cool rushing mountain streams with a neutral pH and fairly hard water. L 52 is from the Rio Atabapo which is a hot, extreme blackwater river with a pH around 4.5 and no measurable hardness. If an aquarist thinks they can keep these fish together, because they are both "Colombian," they will be in for a disaster.
Hope this answers your question.
-Shane

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 18 Jan 2005, 16:03

I agree with Shane but perhaps I thought I could explain a bit more. Planet is a reference site, not a guide site. The difference is best explained by the following example:

Francine walks into her LFS and sees a lovely new catfish, comes home and looks it up on Planet to find out about it. This is the reference model (what we are).

Now, image you have a 48" tank at home with a Pike cichlid skulking around in it. You want to do the sort of thing as described above or even maybe see if you can find out what to keep with your pike or indeed what other fish exist in the same country (regardless of biotope...), such a site would be a guide site and tht's not where we're at.

Hope that explains some of the design calls etc I make with the site.

Jools

Icthician · Post by **Icthician** » 30 Jan 2005, 20:36

Thanks Jools. My inquiry would be as simple as what country the animal is found. Further information about what river system it comes from to determine its care is for discussion within the forum.

For example, as I peruse the new fish in the update column or the Cat-e-log, there will be a picture with no other information. Someone has got to know from which country it came from even if they cannot provide anything else. For instance, the new Ancistrus sp 12. What country does it come from?

How would that information be interpreted differently from the fish that provide full information already?

I apologize now for being a bucket head!

pturley · Post by **pturley** » 31 Jan 2005, 03:55

Francine,
My suggestion would be to use the FISHBASE links whenever they are available (they are not on all species yet). One of the the first pieces of data you'll find in the resulting species summary is collection locale. Exactly the data you are looking for.

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 31 Jan 2005, 08:32

... and the Ancistrus sp(12) is labelled as such becuase I DON'T know what river or even country it came from...

One thing I was going to do was go through all the species and add in their type locality, but I was kinda holding that off until we have some sort of type locality mapping tool that would allow a picture to show the fishes type locality. This would only be limited help as type locality and distribution range are two very different types of data.

Jools

Icthician · Post by **Icthician** » 01 Feb 2005, 01:59

Okay, okay

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 01 Feb 2005, 09:34

Icthician wrote:Okay, okay

Not that I don't think it's a bad idea...

Jools

TalenT · Post by **TalenT** » 09 Sep 2005, 19:18

Just did a forum search and found this thread. I was looking for a list on which catfish species that lives in a certain body of water, say, for example Rio Guariquito, South America.

Suggestion (and ONLY a suggestion): Would it be possible to have a function on this site where you could click on a name of, for example, a river and get a list of catfish (or better: fish) known to live in that particular river. This could be handled like a forum thread (or similar) where all participants on the forum could "suggest" species that "might" live in that river and then the "experts" and moderators would only have to confirm that it is correct (or deny it if it's incorrect) and add the species to the list for that particular body of water. That way, everybody gets to contribute to this and doesn't have to be an unmanagable load of work for one person only.

What do you think? Total crap?

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the people maintaining this site for one of the best sites ever. You are truly doing some great work with this site.

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 11 Sep 2005, 14:57

ItÂ´s not hard to do technically, itÂ´s just that we donÂ´t have this data for many of the species anywhere (let alone in the cat-elog). ItÂ´s not where they are you have to know, itÂ´s where they are and where they are not if you see what I mean.

That said, I have been thinking about this a lot in the last week and have been experimenting with ideas for the site.

I think we will have to use drainage systems as one unit of distribution and countries as another. C,L and LDA numbers also have their own issues.

ItÂ´s hard to work it out, but I am thinking abouy it.

Jools

Post by **Shane** » 11 Sep 2005, 16:13

Jools,
Naming the drainage would be much easier. It just depends on how far you want to break this down. Is "Amazon" sufficient or "Amazon: Rio Yavari," or "Amazon: Rio Yavari, a blackwater tributary?" If we just stuck to the general drainages (e.g. Orinoco, Amazon, Magdalena, etc) it would be a fairly easy field to add. Of course, this goes back to the point of how useful this information would be. Fishes from Villavicencio would belong to the "Orinoco" as would L Number plecs from Puerto Carreno, but those from Villavicencio are from fast, clear, cooler water and those from the Orinoco from fairly slow blackwaters that are quite warm.
-Shane

MatsP · Post by **MatsP** » 12 Sep 2005, 11:32

I think to some extent, this is already implemented in Fishbase [it certainly allows finding fish that lives in, for instance, Orinoco.]. It's limited to the bigger bodies of water, and it still has the problems that Shane described above, as fish caught on small tributataries to Orinoco would either not be listed at all, or be listed as Orinoco, whilst the water conditions in the tributary is potentially a completely different type than the main river itself.

Fishbase also supports searching by country, but as Shane also explained, this is not a very good way to figure out which fish can go together in a tank. It can be helpful sometimes in identifying which particular specie one fish is, in the case where country of origin is known [and the information in Fishbase is correct!].

--
Mats

jen.nelson · Post by **jen.nelson** » 14 Sep 2005, 00:39

On a related note, I'd thought that it would be useful to be able to search for a particular value (or range of values) in a particular field. For example, I might be interested in cories to put in a tank I already have. I could search for Family "Callichthyidae" with a value for pH that includes 7.0 and a value for Temperature that includes 26. A searcher could include as many or as few fields in the search as desired. Obviously the fields could include Type Locality - which would seem to answer the original inquiry - maybe as a dropdown list...

Jen

Post by **Shane** » 14 Sep 2005, 00:53

Jen,
Not sure how hard that would be for Jools and Rusty to do, but I really like the idea. I belive that for every fish there is data on in the Cat-Log the holotype location is also already included. I also like the idea of searching by sizes, aquarium needs, etc.
-Shane