PlanetCatfish.com

Here are the first pics on Planet Catfish of the "Chiapas catfish" from Mexico, which represents an undescribed species, genus and family. It's the ugly ones that are the most interesting.

Eventually, I hope to be able to take some better pics for the Cat-eLog, but there's not really that much leeway with a dead fish.





PS. Shane, I have locality data for this fish. In case you want to go take a look see yourself .

Thanks HH, I look forward to having a tank full of the soonest.
-Shane

A tank full? These guys aren't small. The fish in the picture is about 30 cm SL. And I'm quite sure that's not full-grown.

I was just cruising the net looking for additional info and saw a size quote at 43 cm. I did not realize they were so big. I'll still try to get some live photos.
-Shane

The fish in the picture came from some kind of National Park, I believe. I don't know what hoops you would have to jump through to collect in a place like that in Mexico.
Anyway, I will get the locality off of the label tomorrow and email it to you.

How would I label this fish if adding a pic or two to planet? You know computers, need everything in order. Where does the word Chaipas come from, is it a place or body of water? Given this example

Family: Siluriformes(1)
Genus:undescribed
species: sp(1).

Would that about do it? What are the conventions for something that can't even be placed at family level?

Jools

There is no fixed convention for dealing with that. Usually one would put "Family (or genus) indet. (indeterminate)" in a publication.
You might want to hold off on using the pics I posted, though. I might be able to get better ones (fish isn't going anywhere after all).

i like the look of that cat it sort of reminds me of a very young wels cat

such a looker

INTERESTING.....whats the colour ,if known of this cat?... like a red tail maybe?

It's just plain gray all over.