PlanetCatfish.com

Folks,

Some of you might enjoy this. I have a 10 year old Panaque (L.027b I think) and an Ancistrus (no idea which one) that are completely inseparable. I got the Panaque some time in 1995, and when I went to live in the US for a while, it moved in with a friend who kept Malawi cichlids. She'd also introduced a couple of tiny Ancistrus. One vanished, but the other did well.

Now I'm back, and it's my turn to have these catfish while my friend switches over to marines. Anyway, the two fish seem to be really good friends, and whenever they are 'sleeping' they choose the same spot and lie alongside each other. It's not as if they're forced to, there's plenty of other bits of wood and all kinds of dark spaces underneath and behind the plants in the tank.

Actually, the Panaque has used this same piece of wood since I bought her, and the Ancistrus seems to wander off to look for food during the day but always returns 'home' when she feels like a snooze. It's really very, very cute.

I've put a picture up here:

http://homepage.mac.com/nmonks/aquaria/ ... photo.html

Is this unusual? Are they just lonely? I always thought these fish were territorial and best kept alone, but seemingly not.

Cheers,

Neale

I'm not sure, but it looks like your tank has little in the way of hiding places, so the two fish sitting close together is probably more a sign of them wanting to hide than anything else.

Get them each a place to hide, and they'll behave more like normal Pleco's.

--
Mats

Mats,

Thanks for your comments.

Trust me, there's plenty of hidey-holes. There's at least 4 other bits of bogwood the small catfish could be under, and the entire back pane of glass is hidden with Vallisneria spiralis and Vallisneria gigantea. My school of glassfish spend a lot of time there, and the Awaous gobies have dug a system or runs along the back and under at least two of the bits of bogwood. It's actually pretty cool to find them dive down one burrow and come up another.

If they were being forced together, I'd expect to see the bigger one shoo away the smaller one, but it just doesn't happen. No fins get raised, there's no shuffling. I've been keeping fish for 20 years and I have a degree in marine biology... I know fish aggression when I see it. There isn't any here, that's what is so surprising.

We've deliberately kept these fish together because they seem to like each other. If I had the choice, I'd have sold them both (neither really makes an ideal fish for a seagrass-theme tank!). But we didn't want to split them up!

Sentimental hogwash? Maybe!

Cheers,

Neale