PlanetCatfish.com

MatsP wrote:Ed, very interesting.

If you can find the photo, please send it to me: mats at planetcatfish dot com, and I will post it to the P. suttoni page.

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Mats

Hi Mats, ok, dumb question...how can I send you an e-mail via planetcatfish? I'm looking around and I don't see an option to e-mail you directly unless I get your e-mail address. I think you can look up mine
I looked around in my laptop and found one of the pics, seems I deleted a couple more at some moment but I will ask Wil to resend them to me.
I don't know if Shane still has those sent to him by Cesar Barrios (Universidad de Los Andes in Merida), (Shane, the dead suttoni on the styrofoam icebox caught by the fisherman from Encontrados) which I also have. I can ask permission to publish those also if you still don't have them.
Regards
Ed

Supposedly a breeding pair for $1,000 plus they have young (fry?) from this same pair? So they must have been bred based off this guy's for sale listing.

I am skeptical that this is a proven breeding pair rather than just a "pair" of animals. Seller says he has access to smaller ones, but it is not clear that he means they are fry from this pair. He says he has photos on request. Anyone on Aquabid fancy asking for them?

Ed, Cesar's pics are already in the Cat-elog under . I am not sure I have any pics on hand that were taken by Wil or Don.

The Magdalena River Basin and the Lake Maracaibo Basin are separated by the Perija Range, the northernmost tip of the Andes Mountains which separate Northwestern Venezuela and Northeastern Colombia and the Catatumbo River and Magdalena River, though having there watersheds very close to each other, have no connection and are isolated by very high mountand in the central Colombain Andes. Taking into account that these are young mountains from a geological POV...the species may very well have been there before being isolated into the two subbasins.

I think that this is the most likely scenario as well. If P. cochliodon was already well adapted to the environment when this split happened, the two populations may have not diverged enough from each other to recognize them as distinct spp. even though they have been separated a long time.

This has happened throughout the Magdalena, Maracaibo and Orinoco basins. 42 of the 84 spp found in the Catatumbo also occur in the Magdalena and 28 sp found in the Catatumbo are also found in the Orinoco. 11 spp are found in all three drainages.

Just as sharing spp can link two drainages, the absence of major groups of fishes can say even more. In this case, the Magdalena and the Maracaibo are both "missing" the same major groups (i.e. there are no Corydoras in either drainage). I say absence has even more impact in understanding these relations because shared spp could also have been introduced at some point by humans or even natural means.

-Shane

I will ask to see photos

Hi Shane, thnx for the update. I had just sent Cesar's pics again to Mats. I sent one where Wil is "posing" a nice BEP caught off a well platform near the mouth of the Catatumbo. Don took the pic. I somehow deleted some other pics I had from this series but wrote to Wil and asked him to resend. I will send them to Mats as soon as I have them.
Regards
E

Pictures are in the queue to be added, but I have a bit of a backlog, so it may take more several days of adding pictures before I get to the latest ones.

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Mats

Mats now has another two pics (the three Wil sent me) showing the live fish out of the water while he holds it and Prof. Taphorn takes the pics. Also a take of the head straight from the front and a nice zoom in on the mouth. This particular specimen may measure some SL 8-9 inches, but I will try to get exact measurements.
Regards
Ed

I am amazed about the level of interest there is in the Blue Eye Panaque which if it comes from the Lake Maracaibo and basin runs up to US$2000 each. Who is able to afford a potential breeding group of a pleco which may well exceed 16 inches?

I get the academic interest in trying to determine if the Colombian Blue eye Panaque warrants a separate species designation or not