I've had a mixed bag of experiences with Chaetostoma spp. over the last ~8 years I've been in the hobby.
My first
was naively put straight into my 5x2x2 community of riverine fish, it "greeted" me everyday when adding food to the tank, but I'm not sure I ever saw it eat, I was gutted to find it dead ~5 weeks later after a few days of not "greeting" me.
MartinS and MatsP collected my Barilius specimens a couple of years later and Martin brought along what I now believe is a
for me. This time, I quarantined for at least a month, ensuring that I saw it react to dried food and eat it before adding it to a community of small riverine fish. Still with me six(?) years on, must be a good 9+cm SL.
Later the same year as obtaining the joropo, I bought a trio of
, again putting them in in quarantine. Two of them readily learned to eat various dried foods, but sadly one never did and slowly died of starvation over weeks. The other two are still with me, a good 7+cm SL.
~2013, I came across a lovely small
at the bi-annual auction held in Basingstoke. Again the isolation period to ensure it recognised food before it joined the others. Its growth rate was much slower, maybe reaching ~4.5cm SL before mysteriously being found dead in 2016 IIRC.
In 2015, I obtained two
locally from someone shutting down their tank and IIRC, I took a "big gamble" and added them straight to my community, but paid very close attention to them reacting to food (which they did, thankfully). One of them was found dead the best part of a year later (? PlanetCatfish "my cats" doesn't keep records of fish that die, which would help my bad memory), with an odd looking dark green patch in what I presumed was its stomach. The other is still with me, again very slow growing like the dorsale, I'd guess ~4cm SL... At best half the size of my other three that have all been in with my Steatocranus casuarius group for several years!
So from eight specimens, five made it through that crucial early period of teaching them to each dried food and even that QT period was not always successful, I'm far from an expert fish keeper and I hate loosing fish through circumstances where I think I did or did not do something that could have made the difference.
Food wise, mine react to Tetra Prima; Vitalis (New Era) Catfish and Plec Pellets; JBL Novorift; Hikari sinking carnivore pellets etc. Some find "painting" food on to pebbles with egg white and then allowing that mix to dry hard helps, especially in the early days of teaching these plecs what hobby food is, I had mixed results with that (one time the mix had not dried enough and my better half had to do an emergency 2x 75% water change due to the "frothy" water).
I've been extremely fortunate to have kept a number of less common fish in my brief fishkeeping history including these Chaetostoma; a quartet of
that are now approaching ~18cm SL after having them for nearly six years when I got them at at ~10cm SL; a
I bought as a ~3cm SL baby in 2012 that rapidly turned into a 20+cm SL fish with a ~6cm mouth gape (who I worry might not be with me much longer); a group of 25
that I ordered as P. buffei; a
that was ordered as a young S. notatus; to then obtain an adult 20+cm SL
a short time later... To name but a few. The biggest miracle of all, in my eyes, is how I've managed to obtain and look after gems like these on a "shoestring budget." Second-hand tanks; not running heaters under normal circumstances; lighting only on two tanks with live plants; bulk buying of food.
Sorry for the long post, it reminded me of how lucky I've been in this hobby and good luck with your search for these low-end tropical catfish!
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