Thermal stress and nutritional deficiencies

[Silurus]

I've been wanting to get a handle on other members' experience with maintaining cooler-water catfishes (particularly hillstream and subtropical species) at high temperatures. My experience with this is that the fish continue to feed fine over a long period of time, but they develop some kind of nutritional deficiency (Vitamin C, perhaps?) and slowly waste away. I've seen this in hillstream bagrids and many sisoroids (Akysidae, Sisoridae, Amblycipitidae) and am thinking of documenting this for the next CotM article I am writing. But before I do this, I am wondering if any one has had a similar experience.

[Viktor Jarikov]

If the following is not useful, feel free to ignore.

Hope to be wrong but it seems like this may be hard to nail. How long a period of time and how slowly would they waste away? If it is years, it would be hard to pin down on temp alone. Ideally, this possibly calls for a long-term experiment with a reference - same fishes kept in another tank side by side but at a more appropriate temp.

My personal experience is confined to only channel catfish but these inhabit places all the way down to northern Mexico and southern Florida, proving themselves highly adaptable.

Everything else I can think of on the topic is second hand. Many keepers of larger fish try to use higher temp to grow their pets faster and then lose them, sooner or later. It is impossible to say in what % of cases the temp was the decisive factor. The only fishes in whose cases this theory may appear firmer are the Bagarius - the mortality rate of these is tremendous and the keeping temp is more often than not higher than it is found in nature. http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forum ... t=bagarius