PlanetCatfish.com

Hey I am new to your site obviously I have not even been here for more than a few days but I find the cat-elog hard to search through although it contains great info . I would really like to know more about these species with an easier way to search for them. It might also be good to have some sort of starting out guide. You guys have all these abbreviations and letters I don't understand. And others I do but it took awhile to figure out. I know that you guys know a lot more and I would like to learn but it is hard without many good sites like you can find on other types of fish. You are doing a great job but it still is very confusing. But knowing my luck you guys already do and I just can't find it.

Can you let us know exactely what is confusing? If you are confused by something many other people probably are as well, but we need to know the what and why. I personally only search the Cat-eLog by scientific name. This seems to be the fastest way to find a particular genus or species for me. If you have not read "Catfishes of the Family Siluriformes" under "Catfish Basics" in Shane's World, you should start there. It gives a good introduction to how the catfishes are classified.
-Shane

Hi,

Fair comment and I agree with Shane. Can you list what things (abbreviations, layout etc) you find confusing and we will chew over what can be done to improve this.

There is an issue here that we are being made aware of and a general "outreach" movement will begin to take effect to help along newbies either to the hobby, to catfish keeping or to advanced aquatic sites. I'm thinking of expanding on the catfish basics side of life too as this is a surprisingly large hit rate. All that said, this is a specialist aquatic site. We're not in the business of helping you set-up your first tank. We do however love helping with your first catfish for that first tank and this means we are often drawn into discussion on beginner level topics.

I think we could explain a few things a bit better though or at least lay things out better so they are more obvious.

All in the aim of hopefully produce a few long term catfish converts too.

Jools

I know I am not interested in setting up my first tank that was accomplished long ago I am new to the catfish side of things and although I love all my fish it is easy to find what I need on them everywhere... But stuff on catfish is difficult(unless they are common types) to find if you don't know many of the scientific names or the numbers (such as L304) you can't find much of anything. And thanks alot fot the help Shane and Jools... Your articles did help on some of it.

longlivethestrange wrote:But stuff on catfish is difficult(unless they are common types) to find if you don't know many of the scientific names or the numbers (such as L304) you can't find much of anything.

So, you're saying you need some way of finding out the names? What specifically did you do when you came to the site, what were you first instincts? What have you found out from doing that?

Jools