PlanetCatfish.com

Hi All,

I found these two at a LFS in Sacramento, California. I'm hoping they are . The tank was labeled , and the LFS salesman said they might be (there were other agassizii in the tank with these, but I didn't see any corys that looked like real schwartzi).

I think they are based on the observations that

1. these fish have 3 lateral black stripes (the top stripe is broken up on one fish), not 2 (therefore not schwartzi);
2. the strongest lateral black strip aligns directly through the center of the caudal peduncle, rather than above or below it (therefore not schwartzi); and
3. the dorsal spine is white not black (therefore not agassizii).

I already own one C141 (male), although mine doesn't look exactly the same as these. I've been interested in getting more C141 to find a potential mate for my male. The store had only two; I suspected they were a male and female based only on pelvic fin shape/pointy-ness. They are only about 1.5 inches SL, so I was a little insecure when sexing them; also, both were relatively thin, so I couldn't use body girth reliably to judge male/female (I attributed the thin bodies to the fact that they were at a LFS and not being loved in a home tank). I bought both just to err on the side of caution.

The fish have been in quarantine for 1 week, and this morning I found about 250 eggs attached to the glass in the quarantine tank. I suppose it doesn't matter if I've found a mate for my lone C141; these two are obviously good mates for each other! LOL

None-the-less, I'm still hoping that they are C141, and I look forward to hearing your opinions on ID.

Cheers, Eric

Here are some of the eggs. They don't look that good to me, but I'm hoping they're viable.

Could they be ?

Eric, is it just the angle of the photos or does the one have a much longer snout than the other? To me at least the one appears more stubby and rounded while the other is longer and almost saddle snout from the pics?

P.s. if that's how nice you decorate a quarantine tank, your regular ones must be fantastic!

I'd say they are Pulcher's. I have 6 of them and they look identical to your pics

CharlieM9 wrote:Eric, is it just the angle of the photos or does the one have a much longer snout than the other? To me at least the one appears more stubby and rounded while the other is longer and almost saddle snout from the pics?

Hi CharlieM9,
Yes the snout of one is longer than the other (if I recall correctly, it's the male with the longer snout). However, the photograph is deceptive - the difference in snout length is no where near as dramatic as it appears in the photos. To highlight this photographic deception, I include two photos of my other C141 - two pictures of the same fish give very different impressions of snout length/shape.
P.S., Please ignore the term "unidentified catfish" in the photos - They are from an earlier thread (viewtopic.php?f=13&t=40936) when I bought my first C141.

CharlieM9 wrote:P.s. if that's how nice you decorate a quarantine tank, your regular ones must be fantastic!

I wish!!! No, the photos of my new fish were taken in a separate 1 gallon tank set up just for taking pictures. I learned that trick from others on this website and from tips at Corydorasworld.com. Honestly, I don't think I use it as well as I could. The actual quarantine tank has only gravel, some old driftwood, a couple of PVC and bamboo tubes for hiding places, and two small Anubias.

Cheers, Eric

sushi1980 wrote:I'd say they are Pulcher's. I have 6 of them and they look identical to your pics

Hi sushi1980,

Yes, maybe it's , but I'm still hoping they're . Compare these PlanetCatfish photos of C141 to my fish shown above; I think they look very similar to each other:

1. image_id=9934
2. image_id=14946
3. image_id=14949
4. image_id=11405
5. image_id=11484

The other C141 I own, shown above in the photos labeled "unknown catfish," resembles a different spotting pattern that is also considered to be C141:

1. image_id=6717
2. image_id=9935

There is a strong resemblance between the photos of Corydoras pulcher and the first group of C141 pictures. I'm wondering if fish called C141 are actually C. pulcher. Based on what I've learned about C141, sadly, there is no locality data for the original C141 specimen, so there's really no way to follow up on this with confidence (maybe someone wants to compare DNA similarities, as has been done with and ; alas, even with these two cats, locality ambiguity prevents people from confidently stating that these two are one and the same).

Does anyone else have ideas? Does anybody have personal experience with both C141 AND C. pulcher? Can you reliably tell them apart?

Thanks, Eric

And as I type this my are spawning too (it's their first spawn). It's a wonderful weekend!

It sounds really good, too wonderful!

Very nice Eric!

Thank you golddty and CharlieM9.

Going back to the question at the heart of this thread, I have received one other opinion (at corydorasworld.com) that these are C141, not pulcher (I will leave names out of this to avoid creating conflicts; but needless to say, since I'm hoping these are C141, I'm happy to receive that opinion).

None-the-less, I feel like there is a lot to be worked out between these two catfish. With all the color variations evident in the photos in the CLOGs of both and , it's difficult for me to identify specific features that definitively separate these two. But so far, I have a few ideas:

1. pulcher appears to grow a much more prominent (taller and thicker) white dorsal spine (sort of like
   Corydoras robustus
   ), compared to C141;
2. in pulcher, there is more (somewhat diffuse) black coloration behind the operculum, just anterior to the upper and middle horizontal stripes;
3. pulcher appears to have more black pigment along the dorsal margin of its body, posterior to the dorsal fin;
4. pulcher seems to have its horizontal black stripes separated by wider white/silver/tan (whatever the pale background body color is) lines, whereas in C141 the black lines are closer together;
5. related to (4), in C141 all three horizontal stripes reach the tail through the caudal peduncle, whereas in pulcher the upper horizontal stripe terminates before the caudal peduncle by blending into the black coloration along the dorsal body margin at or before the anterior edge of the adipose fin, and the lower strip terminates before the caudal peduncle by blending into the ventral margin at the anal fin; and finally
6. also related to (4), in order to allow room for the more widely separated black lines, pulcher appears to have a taller body dorsoventrally (again, sort of like robustus), whereas C141 has a body that doesn't grow so high (this may be an optical illusion created by the wide pale stripes/areas on the flanks of pulcher, and may not be true at all).

I borrowed a gif artwork from Planetcatfish.com (http://www.planetcatfish.com/common/fam ... amily_id=1) and tried to characterize visually the differences I described above; the picture is attached. Also, I looked up the original description of pulcher by Isbrücker & Nijssen (http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/548527), to confirm that the features I've highlighted about pulcher are accurate relative to the species holotype/paratype. The features I list regarding pulcher are mentioned in the original description (except for the tallness of the body), so these features do describe pulcher. But since C141 is not a "formally described" species, the problem is that I don't know what does and what does not "unofficially" fit within our understanding of what C141 looks like.

With the exception of the dorsal spine, all of these features seem rather variable in the photos of both cats, and there is overlap. That's why I'm wondering if C141 might be the same as pulcher. Conversely, if C141 does represent a unique and undescribed new species, how likely is it that what people are currently calling C141 is actually a mix of real C141 and some specimens of pulcher (and thus explaining the two different C141 color patterns mentioned in an earlier post in this thread)?

Feedback?

Thanks, Eric

P.S., After going through all of this analysis, I find it very odd that websites and stores seem to find C141 confused with . Frankly, I find no grounds for that confusion; IMHO, pulcher and schwartzi are far more similar to C141 than is ornatus (although the striping pattern is wrong in schwartzi), and the presence of a white dorsal spine in C141 is a dead giveaway that it's not ornatus. Does the confusion occur because C141 is more likely to be imported with ornatus? And if so, is that mixing occurring at the wholesaler/exporter, or at the site of capture? And if it's at the site of capture, does either schwartzi or pulcher co-occur with ornatus in nature? Does anybody with collection experience know the answer to these questions?

Thank you so much, and I apologize for the length of this post (and the whole thread). Cheers, Eric

Hello Eric,

as it was me to state that your corys are not C. pulcher...

C. pulcher is certainly not identical with C 141, the latter one originating from lower Tapajos which is quite far away from Rio Purus being the type locality of C. pulcher.

Of your six mentioned points IMHO most relevant are:

1. the dorsal spine itself is not so much longer, but stronger and the first branched rays can become very long in males. The colour is usually yellowish or creamy whereas with C 141 it's more whitish to greyish. C 141 never has an extended dorsal fin.

4. it is very typical for C. pulcher to have rather broad black stripes with a big distance to the others. Usually only the medium one (located at the interface of the two rows of body scutes) is complete, the others broken . The contrast to the whitish-silverish background is higher than in C 141. C. pulcher is really damned nice...

There are also difference in the body shape that I cannot really explain. C. pulcher of the same size appears to be more slender.
If you could see both in direct comparison (live) you would agree that they are two distinct species.

C. schwartzi is a short snouted species and can easily be distinguished from both when concentrating on body proportions and the snout shape.
because
C 141 was (or still is) sold as C. ornatus in the pet shops that's why it's always mentioned...

C. schwartzi, C. pulcher and CW028 all originate from the same area.
CW028 is a frequent by-catch of C. pulcher but I also have already seen C 141 mixed in (or something very similar, who knows).
There might be more forms similar to C 141 and closer to Rio Purus drainage than C 141 itself.

Cheers,

Thank you Karsten,

That is very informative. What I am most pleased to read, for the first time ever, is that C141 can be attributed to a particular waterway (lower Tapajos). Until now I have never seen any locality given for C141.

And yes, while my oldest C141 has a slight extension of the first dorsal fin rays relative to the rest of the dorsal fin (as pictured in an earlier thread, viewtopic.php?f=13&t=40936&p=280682#p280635, although the extension appears exaggerated in the photo - it's not so prominent in real life), none of the three specimens I now have display obvious "extensions" of the first dorsal rays like the extensions seen in adult pulcher (image.php?image_id=4936). I had wondered if perhaps my fish were just immature, and whether the extensions would appear as they aged. But now I suspect my cats are fully mature and they will always look basically the way they do now.

The other information is also very helpful. It is true that I based my observations entirely on the photos of pulcher and C141 which I found at this website and at corydorasworld.com, since I have never myself seen a live example of pulcher.
Reflecting on the 6 differences I was trying to describe, I would say that my attempt to describe #5 (the upper and lower stripes not extending onto the caudal peduncle) is consistent with your comment that these stripes are not intact along the body length, but seem to be broken up; and although I'm not sure I was seeing the same thing, my comment in #6, about pulcher's body being taller dorsoventrally may be a misinterpretation of the more slender nature of pulcher's body. I don't know. There are measurements of pulcher's body height and body width in the original Isbrücker & Nijssen paper, but again, without a description of C141, there are no equivalent measurements for C141 to use for comparison.

Ending with the trivial point about C141 being confused with ornatus, I stand by my confusion. I'm not confused about the fact that LFS are selling C141 as ornatus, but by the knowledge that the LFS can't see the difference between these fish; to me ornatus and C141 look nothing alike. And I bet if you could ask a male or female C141, they would say that they can tell the difference too (they're probably offended to be sold as ornatus)! (LOL)

Now I can accept that my fish are indeed C141, and I am looking forward to raising a bunch of baby C141. Hopefully my eggs will start hatching in the next day or so; as I mentioned in the first post of this thread, I'm still a little worried that the eggs might be bad (they haven't molded yet, but they appear to be turning more of a solid color, which I never think is good). So unless I'm screaming with joy by the end of this week, you'll know they were a failure.

Again, thank you so much. Cheers, Eric

P.S.

kamas88 wrote:as it was me to state that your corys are not C. pulcher...

Yes, I know. I just didn't want to attribute that to you, as I didn't know if anyone would want to argue about this. Cheers!