PlanetCatfish.com

Hi!

I picked up a lonely C.aeneus "black" at the lfs. I dont have the digicam here so i cant show a pic yet.
I heard from Ian that theres a natural ocurring black version and a czech manmade? one.

Mine is a very dark brown with very dark fins. No reddish touch at all. The guy at the lfs said they come from Brasil...directly from Bogota... so im not really sure if he was just clueless or they really coem from Bogota.
Any opinions?

Good chance he could be correct, Bogota is in Colombia and is closer to the source of the Aeneus Black which is Venezuela.

I had the same thought at the beginning but his Brasil/Colombia mixup made me question this information...

I thought that these "black" aeneus are bred form? Sometime earlierin this or some other forum(don`t remember) somebody mentioned them to originate from Poland(not close to Venezuela )

To shed some light on the subject, the first C. aeneus (Black) and they were sooty black, that came into the UK came from a breeder in the Czech Republic, these were successfully bred and the strain soon spred around the country, I still have a trio. Now whether the Czech breeder has exported his fish to other art of the world I do not know, but there is every likely hood that he has.

Looking at the natural angle, I believe Shane was collecting a very dark form of C. aeneus in Venezuela, but I don't believe that they were exactly what could be described as black, perhaps Shane could shed a little more light on these.

Ian

The "black" aeneus we collected in Venzuela are an entirely different fish. If you accept the validity of C. venezuelanus then you are better calling those fish C. venezuelanus "black". The black cory we are talking about above is this fish:

.

To my mind it is closer to C. melanotaenia.

Jools

Jools is correct. There is a "black" form of C. venezuelanus that comes from the llanos of Venezuela and Colombia. The best photo of this fish can be found on pg. 44 of Seuess' "Corydoras." There is also a dark form of C. melanotaenia that comes out of the southern llanos of Colombia. The photo Jools posted looks like the dark melanotaenia to me.
"From Brasil directly to Bogota" makes perfect sense. Most commercial collection in Colombia takes place in Leticia on the Amazon. Leticia borders Brasil with the half of the town in Brasil called Tabatinga and the half in Colombia called Leticia. Look closely at a map of the area. Up river on the Amazon's north bank is Colombia, up or down river on the south bank is Peru, and downriver on the north bank is Brasil. The borders are so funky that you are really never sure what country you are in down there. That said, I am not sure how your dealer could know that a fish was collected on the Amazon's north bank downriver from Leticia before being flown to Bogota. The collectors ply this entire area and even they can not even remember exactly what fish was caught in what country after 4-5 days out collecting.
-Shane

I recently picked up 7 of these fish that look identical to your picture, Jools. I haven't opened up my Suess book in awhile, so after reading Shane's post, I was curious on if it looked like the fish on page 44. In my opinion, the fish in the photo look like the fish on page 45. So to clarify, where exactly does the black aeneus in Jool's photo come from? BTW, that would be cool to have some sort of interactive map to plot species of fish into rivers and collection points. That way I can plan a collecting vaction some day!
Mike

@mickey from a technical standpoint (as a geography student) a gis with a content of what you said would be no problem. Only the time/work to complete such a thing would be immense. Imo it could be used as some kind of diploma work or similar...well anyway the basis would be a table of species with drainage/river information...if smb would provide this i could try to build sth on a primitive basis...

Actually, something akin to that already exists (to a limited extent) in the Neodat database at http://www.neodat.org. If you search the collections by species, there is an option for you to plot the collection localities on a map, although not all of the data can be rendered this way.