PlanetCatfish.com

Hi all-
biotope may well be the wrong word ("sympatric distribution" would probably be better), and I'll probably never get as far as putting together this idea due to lack of tank space (I started just keeping South American species and haven't even been able to stick to a continent let alone a tributary or location!), but...

The Cat-eLog has very useful search functions for finding catfish which occur sympatrically (or thereabouts, as some of the locations are quite large not all the catfish hits for a locality will be truly sympatric, but it's good enough for this). Is there any easy way to find information on non-catfish which occur in the same region? I don't really want to set up a biotope aquarium as such at the moment but would like to "plan" several ideas to see what would be available. At the moment I can only thinking of going through books or the internet to look at species individually to see where they're listed as being from, and it's not normally specific enough for what I have in mind.

Unfortunately, I only know 1 place on the internet providing this kind of info: Here.

However, as stated, this forum happens to be a bit specific

Personally I've had a Rio Topajos tank, I went thrrough the possible fishes the hard way: books, google et cetera

cheers Bas Pels- that's the answer I was expecting, I was just hoping there was some clever search on something like FishBase that I wasn't aware of!

Actually, fishbase has a geographical (Information by Ecosystem) search function. Unfortunately, it is not as precise as the Cat-eLog, Rio Tapajos for example, isn't considered as a separate river - it counts as "Amazon basin".

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Mats

Actually, one can go through various collection databases of museums with a sizable fish collection and get more exact information, but you would be constrained by the limitations of the collection itself.
Still, I can think of no better way of getting information on syntopic (as opposed to merely sympatric) species.

Still, I can think of no better way of getting information on syntopic (as opposed to merely sympatric) species.

This has always been my problem with biotope aquaria. I feel the habitat conditions are far more important than vague locality.

Biotope aquaria seem to me an exercise in futility. The "rules" have to be relaxed by such a large extent to even stand a chance of accommodating more than one syntopic species in one tank.

Nothing wrong with creating themed aquaria, but as most people eventually realise, the species you need to complete the biotope are never available in the trade.

racoll: I completely agree. Keep fish together that naturally would share the same living conditions, not that come from different parts of the same river(-system).

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Mats

http://fish.mongabay.com/biotope.htm

The above link might be useful???

Thanks all; as previously stated I'm some way away from attempting something like this, but you've given me enough to think about so it was worth posting! I think Racoll will prove to be right regarding fish availability from specific locations (I remember the Llanos biotope thread recently), although I'd still like to be able to see what species live together in specific locales, even if they have to be substituted for similar species due to availability.

Bigpig: thanks for that link; it seems variable how detailed it is but definitely worth investigating.

Basically, my interpretation of a biotope aquarium is one that is habitat/niche specific to the fish concerned, irrespective of whether or not they actually live cheek to cheek in nature.

The suitability of the decor, water parameters and layout of the tank are in my view more important than the collection localities of the fish species.

I keep wild green discus in a 5' blackwater tank. The tank is stacked top too bottom with bogwood, probably from Africa and Malaysia, with African Anubias and European Ceratophyllum plants at the surface. This represents the tangled acara-acu bushes overhanging the water. I also keep cardinal tetras with the discus, although they are not found anywhere near each other in the Amazon basin. They share a similar, but probably not identical habitat in their range.

I still consider this to be a "biotope" aquarium, as it is interpreting the habitat in which the discus in the wild live.

racoll wrote:I keep wild green discus in a 5' blackwater tank.

I've looked at your picture and description of that tank a few times- it looks really impressive. I wouldn't really consider it to be a true biotope aquarium in the strictest sense, but I understand what you mean in terms of providing a close habitat match (which is the primary objective in reality), and agree with your earlier comments about most attempts at strict biotope aquaria being an exercise in futility. Even Heiko Bleher's attempts on PFK left me pretty cold, and if an importer/collector can't produce a great biotope tank then any "normal" hobbyist is on a hiding to nothing.

On the topic of museum collections, I thought I might give a link to the collection of my old employer, the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
http://artedi.nrm.se/nrmfish/

You can search for a species (Corydoras hastatus, say) and then you copy the field number or locality from a hit which seems interesting (Río Paraguay at estancia Doña Julia, say] and do a search on that. This'll tell you where it was captured and what other fish were captured. The information is sufficient that one could make a decent biotope aquarium for that locality. Some localities even have photos.

Of course, the info is limited by what's in the museum collection.

If anyone's got links to other museum collections with this type of functionality, feel free to share.

Thanks Mike- that's a great link. I think that's the kind of link Silurus was referring to, but I've been away from research so long (my PhD was way back in '93) that I've lost touch with where most of the museum collections are- most of them didn't have website links then.