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Hello,

Just a rookie here trying my best to find out the sex of my L260's. With my own untrained eye i tried my best to pick 3 females and 1 male. I'm not sure about that now. Picture was taken right after unpacking. They are much darker in colour now.

Thank you,
Marte

1 and 3 look like males. 2 appears young. 4 could be a male too. I'd check their bellies. The Cat-eLog notes females have an all white belly while males have a partially or totally marbled belly. This is also the case in my breeding pair.

Here is a picture of my breeding group just to help you see. I think al your fish are male but nr 2 is still abit to young for deffinate.
This is a male (left) en 2 females.

Thank you Suckermouth and Jac.

Jac, the pictures or your breeding group really shows the difference. The male having Gill Odontodes, Pictoral fin Odontodes and body being hairy. The shape of the face definitely has the V shape and the females have more or a U shape. Really appreciate it. What threw me off when i was selecting them was that they never had long gill odontodes. I'm definitely going by the birds eye head profile next time.

I guess time to get more females.

I got some from the same seller and almost all of them looked like males to me. Luckily I wanted a male for the female I already had.

An all white belly has nothing to do with the sex of the fish. I've watched both white and spotted bellied L260 lay eggs.

CanadaPleco wrote:An all white belly has nothing to do with the sex of the fish. I've watched both white and spotted bellied L260 lay eggs.

Are you breeding them now?


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CanadaPleco wrote:An all white belly has nothing to do with the sex of the fish. I've watched both white and spotted bellied L260 lay eggs.

I agree because color patterns are simply too variable to rely upon in sexing this species.
I have been keeping and breeding L260 since '06 and have reached the point where I have bred my own F1 adults thus now I am raising some F2 from my collection of L260.

I have not had a lot of success breeding mine. Mainly due to infrequent spawns, small brood sizes and delicate fry. It has been a three steps forwards and two steps back over the years thus it is taking me more time than I expected to accumulate the target of at least 50 adults retained for breeding. I began with six survivors and presently have about 38. If I hadn't lost some or part of some broods I would have had close to 75 specimens by now.
I had some major losses among my original sub-adult wild specimens I acquired in '06 which reduced my original 12 wild fish to only about 6 adults during my initial parts of my learning curve. I only began my serious forays into collecting groups of rarer small Hypancistrus in the summer of 2006.

CanadaPleco wrote:An all white belly has nothing to do with the sex of the fish. I've watched both white and spotted bellied L260 lay eggs.

I'll admit all I have to go on is PlanetCatfish and the fact that my breeding pair fits with what PC says.