Lophiosilurus alexandri

[walshy317]

i just want to know some information on

Lophiosilurus alexandri

everything you know please
thanks
marc

[Edit: add clog-tags so that I don't have to look up the fish --Mats]

[MatsP]

Moving this to South American catfish (everything else) as that is where it belongs.

A serious fish for the serious aquarist - it may not need as large a tank as other fish of the same size, but you should still consider a tank that is larger than your usual home-tank. Something around 3m (10ft) long and about 1.2m (4ft) wide - CFC's 900g that is 8ft tank would do for several years, I expect. If you can commit to that, they have one at Wildwoods [unless it's sold since Monday afternoon]. Can't remember the price, but it wasn't "cheap".



It would be good if instead of asking "tell us everything you know", you could ask definite questions (e.g. "Can I keep it with X" or "Does it like to eat Y"). It can bet quite wasteful of everyones time to produce a post that contains all they know about some fish (I could probably write about 4 pages of information on

Ancistrus cf_cirrhosus

- but I doubt I would if someone asked a question like "give me all you know", since it is not very specific, and 3.8 of those 4 pages would probably be irrellevant to what the poster ACTUALLY wants to know).

--
Mats

[Silurus]

I am babysitting a trio of juveniles at the moment (only until the end of the week) and here are my observations:

1. Fine sand is the best substrate for this species. The fish will burrow into it and remain invisible.

2. If you have to feed live food, ensure that the intended prey spends a lot of time on or near the bottom, as these are classical ambush predators. I am feeding the fish live shrimp at the moment, which works quite well (one fish ate five shrimp in very short order). Some glandulocaudine tetras were introduced as dither fish/food and they remained untouched until I decided to rescue them.

[sidguppy]

I think the trick is to find someone who's up to the ears in unwanted cichlid-fry.

baby convicts, baby dovii, kribs, jewels, that kind of stuff.
or even halfgrowns.
these cichlids are always hanging out near the sand.

another trick is livebearers. then feed just a tiny bit of sinking food; they will come down and woosh the Lophiosilurus will get at them

barbs might also work. not danio's, but real barbus and puntius. maybe lesser quality massbred stuff from a LFs or so.

[arapaimag]

I've kept them for many years. I feed primarily cut up fish including smelt, mackerel,herring, pink salmon, whitefish,shrimp. I also keep a large population of guppies in the tank.

Since they do get quite large you will eventually need a large tank for them. My largest got to 26"tl in 7 years.

[CFC]

Feeding won't be a problem, in my experience they readily take frozen food and quickly become hand tame swimming up the glass to take food from the surface, they can even become too tame and refuse to take food that isn't offered by hand as mine did when I was target feeding it to make sure a gready gulper cat didn't eat all the food.

Growth is fairly fast up to around 12 inches (30cm) and then seems to slow down so a tank of 5x2x2 feet would suffice for a long while, but eventually a larger tank would be needed if the fish reaches anywhere near to full adult size, they do however never move unless feeding or very hungry so providing huge ammounts of floor space is quite unessesary provided the system has enough volume to dilute the waste from a large predatory fish with an even larger apppetite, something in the region of 300 gallons of water should be ample for a single specimin.

[arapaimag]

Wow yours has grown a lot faster than mine.

I noticed you've had the fish for only 7 months. It took me about a year and a half to get mine from 4" to 12".

How big was yours when you bought it?

[CFC]

I've had it a longer than 7 months, I just didn't update my My Cats page until 7 months ago. I bought mine at 4" around Christmas 2007 so the time frame is very similar with an average growth of half an inch a month.