PlanetCatfish.com

Any guess please. 13 inches. Thank you.

It's almost certainly a Hypostomus of some sort - which one is a much harder question to answer.

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Mats

i'm thinking it might be or

it's very difficult to identify Hypostomus species, so these two are just my best guesses.

I thought it looked the most like Hypostomus hemicochliodon ecept it is listesd as maximium size around 8 inches. Figure they get bigger in a tank but 5 extra inches seems like a lot. Thank you again.

IMO

pingpong wrote:I thought it looked the most like Hypostomus hemicochliodon ecept it is listesd as maximium size around 8 inches. Figure they get bigger in a tank but 5 extra inches seems like a lot. Thank you again.

Is your fish 13" standard length (not counting tail-fin) or total length (including tail-fin)? If it's including tail fin, please re-measure the standard length, as that is what is listed in the Cat-eLog - and this measure is not necessarily "the largest fish that ever existed", but the largest one that is either scientifically described, or the largest that we've had documentation of provided to Planet Catfish. When fish are collected for scientific reasons, it's not always that they catch the largest of all fish available - they may only catch fish in one or two places for one or two days - and may well miss the really big ones. It has also been suggested that keeping really big specimens for scientific purposes is not always feasible, so for "space reasons", sometimes the collector will collect several smaller specimens, rather than one large - because scientists like to have more than one of a species to perform various measurements and diagnosis on.

Further, as Duthcfry says [and I said in my post], it's hard to identify the species within the Hypostomus genus, as there are quite a few that are very similar from an external observation standpoint - there's already three listed here.

And finally, according to www.fishbase.org, there are 123 scientifically recognized species of Hypostomus, whilst the Cat-eLog contains 102 species. Several of those 102 species are L-numbers that may well be undescribed species, so there are likely to be somewhere between 123 and 200 species of Hypostomus. So the fish you have may not even be in the Cat-eLog at all.

Unless you know at least which country it came from, it's going to be very hard to figure out which species it is (some of the original descriptions of these fish are also pretty rudimentary and could well do with a bit of overhaul).

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Mats

It's 13 inches right to the tip of the tail. I give up on catching him again. Puts up too much of a fight and I am afraid of upsetting him.The more I look, the more I realize you are right in saying it is impossible to tell for sure what he is but thank you for your time. No idea on the collection area. Take care.