Did you know fantastic help is an anagram of Planet Catfish? This forum is for those of you with pictures of your catfish who are looking for help identifying them. There are many here to help and a firm ID is the first step towards keeping your catfish in the best conditions.
seems like a good ID. There are a few different honeycombed Ancistrus. Most if not all are undescribed scientifically, so without more information (catch location, better pics (like reflecting body base color), etc.), being more precise would be a challenge.
Can you tell us how big this pair is please? They do not look to be fully mature from what I can see..... pictures are sometimes misleading. I am going to guess that you bought them as Ancistrus "Cheese Creek" (L393) as they are going around right now…. I am with Eric on this one, Ancistrus wabenmuster by the looks of them. Maybe someone that has them can confirm what they are for sure.
Here are two shots of them as juveniles (the male is 3 inches easily, the female is 2.5 inches).
They were originally bought as sp Rio Paraguay, however every single rio paraguay I have seen does not keep the caudal stripe in adulthood, it has just gotten brighter on these guys as they have grown with a slightly orange inside edge as pictured on the male in the first post. The female has a white tip on her dorsal, the male just has the smudge of white pictured above. I do not have a catch location as the seller was unable to give me one.
might be right. I agree with Chuck that the fish in the first pics don't look full grown, and several fish in the photos in the Cat-eLog show white tail tips.
They don't just have white tips to the caudal, both display a fully white stripe on the edge of the tail which they have maintained from when I received them in the mail to now.
Have you see any Rio Paraguay that display a full white stripe even when they are sexable? And I cannot say they are Rio Tocantins due to the difference in how broken the spots on Rio tocantins are compared to these two. As well as how thick the black lines between the spots/marks are.
I don't want to make claims before getting clean pictures (doing a couple tank changes today so will try to catch both for a photo shoot), however I have not noticed smaller dots of color in the black lines, just the markings the black is around.
I got clean pictures of the two, both are really calm with being handled, both have the thick white stripe down the caudal fin with an orange coloring going towards the base of the caudal where the normal pattern takes over. They have little bubbles on them in the pictures because it was fresh, primed, water. The single bristle on his snout has three prongs starting. Underbelly of male.