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.
Hello Everyone,
I received these from Colombia this week as Lamontichthys 'Rio Magdalena.' I've never seen this species before and can't identify it by comparing to the Cat-elog photos. I appreciate your thoughts on what they are. This is the first time I've posted here, so I hope I do the pics correctly.
Thank you,
Mark
Mark, I wasn't able to see your pics. Only the first link worked, but it required logging in.
For the other two, you have to change the code. For each, you have to put the url between [img]url[/img].
I won't be able to help ID your fish, but I look forward to seeing the pics - Lamonichthys are so cool
Picture 4 shows a very nice reddish colouring on this specimen. I have seen this in Farlowella too, but apparently they loose this reddish hue after living in captivity for a while. Does anybody know what this actually is, could it possibly have to do with a certain food source they have in their natural habitat but lack in the aquarium?
I have no experience with these catfish, but the general rule is that if you want a fish which is red or yellow in nature, but fades in captivity, to remain red, you feed it astaxanthin-enriched food.
That would imply that the fish eats large amounts of either single-celled algae or small crustaceans in nature, I do not know if this is a realistic assumption for these catfish.
I think it is Sturisomatichthys sp. "Columbia" or "Kolumbien" as Hans and Ingo called them. I received 7 specimens more than ten years ago (1994?) when I moved to Berlin and I am currently breeding them in the 3rd generation. The colour patterns from the first offspring turned out to be very variable ranging from almost yellow without any dark patterns (like in the old book "Handbuch der Welskunde" from Franke) to almost black. The wild-caught grew to more than 16cm within three years and the last wild-caught died about two years ago. The F1 and F2 never grew larger than about 12cm in my tanks. Some friends of mine reported a maxim length of 10cm. How long is your fish?
They are easy to breed with breeding success being around 100% fertilized eggs (numbers ranging from 80 to 130 eggs). The larvae, however, are relatively difficult to raise. I had the best success raising them together with your Otocinclus but never more than 30% grew up.
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