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Hi Guys

Am posting up a few pics of my Sturisoma panamense as Larry (apistomaster) has asked me to have look to check and confirm which Sturisoma i have exactly.

Here is my female that is breeding atm shes currently 10cm and has just laid 100+ eggs last wednesday !





Here is my male who i will try to get a better shot of soon as he`s guarding eggs atm.




Here is another female i purchased awhile ago, she is 20cm and gives me the impression she is old and hasnt bred so far.





I hope these pics are what your after Larry anyway let me know

Cheers
Craig

Craig,
The top two pics are what the Germans call Sturisoma "Colombia." These fish are captured in the lower Magdalena near Santa Marta. They always arrive at the exporters in Bogota in cold (in the mid-60s F) water and the exporters there believe that they are a cold water fish and often place them with goldfish. I really can not comment if their perception that that these are cold water fish is correct, but I have seen 1,000s in unheated tanks with goldfish doing just fine. The belief always seemed strange to me as 1) Santa Marta is hot! and 2) So many hobbyists have kept and spawned them in tropical tanks.
S. panamense, per Evers and Seidel, has a regular, straight dark lateral line (like the fish in your third pic above) that does not touch the dorsal. S. "Colombia" has an irregular line that meets the base of the dorsal and continues up the fin.
This info matches with Oliver's pic in the Cate-log (image 23) of a Sturisoma captured in Panama. All the other pics of S. panamense in the Cate-log are S. sp. Colombia.
-Shane

Shane,

Do you have the [1st] German edition of the Evers and Seidel book?

Because in the second [English] edition they now refer to S. sp. "Colombia" as S. aureum.

I agree that the second fish looks like another species, but it looks to me rather like S. nigrirostrum from Peru.

They look like my Sturisoma aureum I was breeding.
My only female died yesterday for undetermined reasons.
It will be a long wait before any of my fry are mature enough to breed but I do have quite a few.

Thanks everyone for your replies

Shane i could certainly learn much off you with such detailed responces and feel a little more enlightend

Also thanks again Larry your help with my spawn has been invaluable

Cheers
Craig

Racoll,
I'll have to look at the 2nd Ed and see what they say. The "problem" in the hobby is that there is one described sp of Sturisoma from the Magdalena and two commonly exported spp. These spp have been called by a number of valid scientific names (S. aureum and S. panamense being the two most common) in the hobby, but in this case the identifications are very difficult even with access to all the scientific literature out there and exact collecting locality info.
-Shane

There was a full revision of Sturisoma done in 2003, but is yet to be published.

Ghazzi, M.S. (2003) Relações filogenéticas e revisão do gênero Sturisoma Swainson, 1838 (Siluriformes: Loricariidae, Loricariinae). Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, 346 pp.