Ok so this guy has grown to about 1.5" and got moved into a 120 gallon today. Looking very healthy and not quite as secretive as it used to be. Still not exactly a party animal.

I'm thrilled at how this one is turning out!

That's very helpful, thank you Jools. I'm glad to hear this is a captive bred specimen. I always prefer that over wild caught.

This guy is hard to photograph lol. He hides if I'm nearby but as soon as I get 5 feet away he comes out swimming in full bumblebee mode, hard to capture a photo. I purchased him as a Petricola. I want to give him some tank mates but I'm only just learning how to identify this complex genus. He's ...

Ha! Well, apparently I suck at hide-n-seek. Despite the fact that I inspected ALL the nooks and crannies of the driftwood, he's still in there. I decided to take a nocturnal peak, and here's what I found hiding behind the driftwood.

Yeah actually I did check it, there's 2 hug hunks of driftwood that he could hide in and I inspected them out of the tank thoroughly whilst doing maintenance.

It's possible he's somewhere else but there's not much else in that tank

Well, crud, this fish is just utterly gone. It's not hiding, I've checked the couple pieces of driftwood, and there's no dead fish anywhere so perhaps it jumped out and flopped somewhere hidden. Either way, this stinks.

Very cool, thank you!

Found this guy at the LFS labeled as a "Columbian Spotted Pleco" but was the only one in the tank that didn't look like the common variety of pleco. There was also a tank next to it with "P. Julisimaianus", all of which looked more like a gibbiceps, none looked like this guy. Based on pics from this ...

Ok, so let's say you have a 120 gallon 4ft x 2ft x 2ft.

You love catfish and similar things like loaches. You have neutral pH, medium hardness tap water, and plenty of filtration (a sump) and driftwood. Soft sand bottom, maybe a few tough plants.

What are you stocking it with?

I'll be keeping it with an eclectic community of medium sized cichlids and other catfish around a neutral pH. The 120 will be connected to several other tanks (75g, 80g, 29g) all on a common 50g sump. All the other tanks and sump will be in a utility closet and very lightly stocked, there mostly to ...

Hmmm. Any idea how quickly they grow? He's eventually going into a 120 gallon 4x2x2 but based on what I'm seeing, that's still a temporary home for him.

First post here, thrilled to find this site because I've been a catfish fanatic my whole life. Picked up this syno from a shipment of S.nigriventris but clearly is something different. It's barely 1.5"/38mm long and definitely nocturnal. Hides in a driftwood hole all day. Resembles pics of S ...