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I am a bit nervous. The fish will be on the small side for the most part. They are coming from Somewhere in Europe, I think, and will be sent out Wednesday to land on the U.S. west coast Thursday. There they will be rebagged and then sent to me on the east coast to arrive Friday late evening. That means they will be intransit for at least 48 hours and likely in bags (albeit with a change midway) more like 55 hours or more.

My plan is to put them into a warm tank, at least 80-82. It will be well aerated, newly set up bare bottom tank with some rock and wood in it. It will have a couple of cycled Poret cubes. I will not acclimate the fish but will plop and drop them. I plan to feed them not long after they go into the tank- no more than an hour max.- since they will not have eaten in a couple of days.

Any thoughts or suggestions re the above plan are appreciated.

Edit Nov. 4 12:15 a.m. EST : I made two changes to the plan. The first is I am using a pair of 20 gal longs rather than a single tank. Second, I decided not to go bare bottom. I am using a half inch or so of sand. The filtration is a pair of 4 inch Poret 20 ppi cubes in each tank. I have been told the fish were on schedule and I should have them tomorrow night unless Delta screws up.

good luck, all the best .

Update- the fish made it into the states. The sender did not purge them well and the water was nasty. One 1.5 inch was lost during rebagging in clean water. Because the breeder was short of smaller ones, he put in a number of larger fish. However, he only sent 38, so with the one loss, 37 are now on their way to me for pick-up tonight about 10 pm. I was told there are a couple of the larger ones that look amazing.

I will have to worry about renegotiating the cost as the number was to have been 45 fish all in the 1.5-1.75 inch range. Now there are fewer fish, some are smaller and some are larger. I will see how they arrive.

Edit: This fish arrived all alive. They range in size from one at just over an inch to 11 at 2 or more inches. 42 fish arrived and the average size worked out at 1.75 inches. They were pretty stressed out, so their color was awful. Some were washed out and others greyed out. I was less concerned with appearance than counting and sizing them and then getting them into their tanks. I will have plenty of time to see them in their normal coloration once they have settled in.

Good luck. Looking forward to the pictures

Nice! Looking forward to see some pictures of these nice fish.

Any update? Hope to see babies for sale at the next Catfish convention

I will not even try for pictures until I am able to complete a planed shifting out of some stock and the upgrade of a couple of tanks to larger sizes. Until then these guys will stay mostly unseen in their tanks. Because the tanks are slightly over crowded I do see a few fish scooting about. Some have looked real interesting and others not so. But with the 236 I have learned that they really will change in appearance as they grow. So I am really curious to see what I end up with over time.

Edit: I regularly check the tanks 2 -3 times/day. Mostly I am looking for any sick or dead fish and for any uneaten food to clear. I have spotted a few fish today as in one tank a bunch congregate behind the Poret cube. The ones I am seeing are certainly settling in. Their patterning is very prominent now. They clearly show more white than my "regular" 236s.

Sounds
Like good news of no dead fish

I can not wait to see some photos It will be interesting to see how they develop (pattern wise). Are they all superwhites? I know there is alot of interest in the super whites and i have seen a few ppl keeping just them! But you should try and breed back to so called normal every so often to keep the strain strong

Wow I cant wait to also see some pictures! I have some regular L236 but sadly out of the 6 juveniles I bought they all turned out to be males.. lol..

In my country for L236 IRIRI wants 250euro each

As far as I know the 250 is not even close to being a real species and there are no Hypancistrus in the Iriri. As always, I could be wrong and those better informed than I am should correct me if this is the case.

Finally grabbed a few snapshots of some of the fish. I have them in two groups of 21. I had to set up a couple of temp. tanks and once I sent out fome fis I was able to move one temp. tank of 236 to a more perm location. So I took a few quick pics. I am a pretty bad photographer so I apologize in advance for the lack of quality.

It's nice to see photos now, and then again as they age. It'll be neat to see how they change.

Cheers, Eric

I am also interested to see how they turn out. In looking at the half of the fish I got photos of, I am seeing some fish that do not look much different from my "regular" 236s. One the other hand I am also seeing some interesting patterning which is clearly much more white and with thinner black lines/markings.

I have always had my own thoughts on this subject. Sometimes I am on target and other times I am way off the mark. However, as a b&w Hypan. fool, I have my own thoughts on it all when it comes to zebras, 173s and 236s. Some of this has been confirmed or debunked by the experts at CatCon.

1. H. Zebra is clearly an identified species. They breed true, and are collectible in numbers are are easy to idfentify even when newly free swimming.

2. L173 is also likely a species but not identified. They tend to breed somewhat true, are collectible in some numbers but not easy to find. There is variability in these fish as evidence by Glaser's creation of the 173b designation

3. L236 is probably not a species. It is more likely a natural hybrid. SW 236 is definitely a line bred fish. As such, any type of 236 is highly variable in appearance in terms of patterning.

I have also come to believe that the time it takes each of these fish to reach maturity in terms of spawning is much longer for 1 and 2 than for 3 above. As always, these is just my thoughts here and I could be off the mark.

I recently got in 102 new fish with no real place to put them. I just held a sale to move out stuff. What I really need is for Jools to ship me his old fish house........

This is one of my own bred superwhites, it might help you.

@brechtvh

What size is the fish in your pic?

Nearly 5cm TL

I got an assortment of sizes from 1.25 to 2 inches (3.2 - 5.5 cm). They were divided into two equal groups. Those pics are from one group and are somewhat random such that not all fish are shown and some fish will be in more than one picture.

Very nice! Can't wait to see their progression.

As as been my practice for too many years, I have a tendency to buy more fish than I should. The result is I have these fish parked in too small a space. I started a project to upgrade these tanks to 33 longs, but things conspired against the plan and instead of having these tanks in place in November, I will now get them in about 3 weeks.

At that time I will be moving these fish around and will for sure be taking a lot more pictures.

I finally did the upgrade and managed to get pics of some of the other half of the fish. The move involved sorting the fish in two tanks, rehoming them into two different setups (including one brand new tank being set up) and taking down one tank. I have not lost any so there are still 42 fish. It is impossible in a reasonable amount of time to sort them by looks. So, in the end, I simply moved the 26 largest into a 33 gal. long and the 16 smallest into a 20 gal. long. All of this was done in a single day. the pics are for sure not the best but you can get an idea of how the fish looked:

And

They certainly look to have a lot of potential and are gorgeous. Can't wait to see how they look after putting on some size and coloring up.

As a side note, do you think it possible that L250 was actually a species that may have disappeared due to habitat destruction, thus only few were ever found? I worry that with the Belo Monte damn and so many others being built, we may only ever, or maybe never, see a glimpse of certain species that are endemic to that area if their habitat is destroyed.

My personal opinion is that the 250 is basically a natural hybrid. If you look at my thread on the 173b you will see I highlight two of the offspring which I felt were interesting looking. They have a 250 type pattern.

Basically, forgetting all the scientific methods for species identification and consider numbers. A real species should normally be found in some numbers in their natural habitat. Even viable groups of hybrids should be found in numbers even if there is a lot of variability to them. Yet it appears as if the 250 has only been seen once and then in a small number.

Next, the Hypans do not appear to be present in rivers only in one species. Even though the only described species of Hypan from the Xingu is the zebra, a lot of the L numbered Hypans are also found there. It would be an unusual situation that a viable habitat was wiped out and no other known species were involved and that the very last, or close too very last individuals of a species were caught and then moved into the commercial pipeline for ornamental fish.

While I am not a scientist, nor even close, what I do know about populations and keeping them viable in terms of species survival does require a decent number of individuals. As fish keepers who work at spawning our fish most of us should have observed that when working with spawning groups in a single tank, only a select number of individuals do the actual spawning. (I am looking at those fish which spawn as mostly pairs and raise the young vs group spawning or egg scatterers etc.). So to maintain a viable population with sufficient reproduction and to avoid potential inbreeding does require a lot more than a few individuals. In general, viable species population tend to need a critical number of individuals below which the species becomes ever more likely to "fail." All this doesn't mean what you posit is not possible, only that is not very likely as far as I know. What it does suggest is species should exits in decent numbers.

To any of the scientists out there, please correct me if I have this wrong.

I am always waiting to see the updates. They are a fine looking specimen. Congratulations!

I will say that I feel that the group I received were a mix of super whites and regular 236. Some of the fish in my pics look like they should turn out nicely while others really do not look different than my regular 236. I have been spawning the 236 for a few years now and have watched a lot of fish go from free swimming to as much as 2 inches TL before being sold. That is the bad news.

The good news is the supplier is somebody I have worked with for years and agrees that the fish were not as expected. He will fix things one way or another over the next few months. I am patient.

Its not that the fish are not nice looking, its just they were not as promised.

So according your previous postings TTA, hypans can hybridize and the hybrids are fertile, which is not very common comparing with other genera of fishes. Thats not very good, because some breeders do hybrids especially to mix species and to confuse beginers in hobby to keep and breed clean natural species !

Thank you for keeping us updated i only wish i had that many L236 Is there any chance of some photos of your tank setup? as i might change mine around as still no success on the breeding i will leave it a few months first and try the old lower temps rain water etc

I am happy to hear your supplier will make things right for you regarding these super white L236.

In regards to the fabled L250, it seems we may never know but your theory was fascinating and insightful