for easier eggs colection you can use a spawing mop. What are spawning mops made out of? Do you buy them or make your own? Oh, I found it on another post ( http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=34952&p=236404&hilit=spawning+mop#p236404 ). To channel Rosanne Rosannadana ...

Just a quick reply, because I'm on my mobile phone. Of course, the CO2, duh! Don't know why I didn't think that in first place. Don't find many floating plants at LFS in Stockton (IDK why not). Yesterday I drove 1 hour to LFS in Sacramento to get some frogbit and a few other rooted plants. IMHO, tha...

Yes, I can definitely do that! It's always been my understanding that terrestrial plants can be more photosynthetic because of the direct light exposure (no light being absorbed by water). Does this small portion of plant above the waterline really have a bigger impact on nitrate levels than a propo...

But ... those 96.5% of people with PhDs have to be getting jobs somewhere, and my hunch is that they are taking the jobs that should be offered to people with Master's, thus creating a qualification-inflation problem, and increasing overall competition for all related jobs in the sector. Yes, this ...

Absolutely, but my concern is that the college education (I'm talking PhD here) trains you solely for working in research, and yet only 3.5% of PhD graduates get research jobs. That to me is a very worrying statistic. The transferable skills learnt during a PhD are often undervalued in other career...

Jools wrote:Eric, Thanks for posting, I will have a look at this when I get home from catcon2014 although I really do think your pictures are not as bad as you think by any means!

LOL. Thanks Jools, for your graciousness.
- Eric

Sounds great, but one has to sacrifice an awful lot in academia: family, friends, relationships, even pets, and not just once, many many times over. And the worst thing is, that there's actually very little hope at the end of it all, of getting a job in what you were trained for 10 years to do. Thi...

Hi David, Thanks for the suggestions. I wouldn't even consider the idea of using a deep substrate bed for this purpose in a FW aquarium for many reasons, but mainly because it wastes valuable swimming space Very true - As I mentioned above, I set up an experimental tank, a standard 15 Gallon, with 4...

Hi Narelle, Parts of your story remind me of my start, although there are definitely also some differences: Like you, I consider myself a newbie to catfish keeping; I’ve been keeping catfish for only two years. And like you, I decided at a relatively young age that I wanted to find some career with ...

I recently tried to remove a photo of one of my catfish (on the "My Cats" page) by using the "Tick to delete this image" checkbox. I was trying to remove the old photo without uploading a new photo because I don't yet have a better photo of my catfish. However the function didn't...

The plants do more than provide a little bit of oxygen, they provide enough to support aerobic nitrification Hi TwoTankAmin, Thank you for the articles; I'll take some time to digest them. As to my earlier point, I did not intend to minimize the magnitude of gas transport by the plants, or suggest ...

Hi Darrel,
I was able to get it successfully. Apparently my institution has access.
Thanks, Eric
P.S., I noticed that there's no thick gravel bed in those tanks of yours, but definitely well planted.

you might consider a "Winogradsky column" < http://archive.bio.ed.ac.uk/jdeacon/microbes/winograd.htm >. I've just set up a new one. Yes, we've used Wingradsky columns before. They are really neat, too. I think that the aquarium setup appeals to me because of its practical application, ev...

Dang it - Do you ever spend a good long time... almost an hour, literally... crafting what you want to say next, and then your browser freezes and you lose it all?!? Oh well, all I can do is start over: Thank you all for your comments. A lot of you have responded, so I won't attempt to quote from in...

The LFS owner's advice to Bekateen that high O2 levels from "over filtration" cause algae is patently ridiculous. Shane, I will be honest and state that I may not have represented my LFS owner's position completely right. I mean that I might be putting words in his mouth on this point: He...

bekateen, you wrote that your local tap water may suffer from variations in quality from time to time. Rather than doing something to try to improve your tap water, is there any chance that you can collect rain water? A large rubbermaid garbage can placed under a gutter pipe can collect water quite...

Hi All, Do any of you rely on a deep (4"/10cm or deeper) gravel bed and denitrifying bacteria to control nitrates in your aquaria? A LFS owner recently told me that this approach can have profound positive effects on water quality in aquaria. The idea appeals to me, if it works, because my muni...

Hi Soccerdad925,
I'm in Stockton, but alas, I don't get out fishing.
Eric

Suckermouth wrote:The free links on Zootaxa papers that are not open access include only the first page and the pages with references.

I'm not used to encountering truncated downloads like that, so I didn't check after page 1. Major faux pas on my end -- Sorry about that.

http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/2014/f/z03869p312f.pdf

This should be a free download. Please let me know if it's not.

I didn't get back to the LFS until last night. Upon closer inspection, yep, the nose says it all, if a nose can talk: It's

Corydoras paleatus

, not

Scleromystax macropterus

(sorry the photo is so bad - Nokia 900 phones have crummy cameras ). Thanks for the input.

How to breed albino Corys, scaled up for commercial production (here's how they did it in India): Mahapatra, B.K. & Dutta, S. 2014. Breeding and Rearing of an Exotic Ornamental Catfish, Corydorus (sic) aeneus (Gill, 1858) in Kolkata, West Bengal and Its Economics. Proceedings of the Zoological S...

I have a group of hybrid corys whose parents are albino aeneus and gold lasers. Unless the two species are very closely related, interspecific hybridization opens a whole new can of worms, when compared to intraspecific hybridization. Does anybody know the chromosomal make up of either aeneus or go...

I would have thought the snout shapes of the two would easily tell them apart. Doesn't Scleromystax have a longer snout with a flatter dorsal profile? Is it as straight forward as that? I'll be back at the LFS tonight, so I'll take a look. Are there any other features of clear distinction in juveni...

What are the definitive ways to tell apart a sub-adult high fin peppered cory Scleromystax macropterus and a sub-adult long-finned variety of peppered cory Corydoras paleatus ? I can see that the paleatus tend to be more grey/black whereas the macropterus tend to be more tan/brown, but in the photos...

Here is an article ( Active Inbreeding in a Cichlid Fish and Its Adaptive Significance ) that finds some level of inbreeding to be a good thing for the fish in this case, with no measurable negative effects on growth rate. But there are plenty of other articles that show, not surprisingly, inbreedin...

This being said - would it make sense with a limited population of a certain fish (i.e. chances of getting new wild stock for better blood lines are slim) to breed only the larger fry (ones that are more heterozygous)? To continue the captive population in the best way possible. Regardless of the i...

In my limited experience with corys, banjo cats, and several cichlid species, I find that within a group of juveniles (all siblings hatched at about the same time), there will inevitably be one, or two, or maybe a few individuals, that accelerate ahead in growth, far ahead of all the other juvies. O...

Thanks Rob.
Cheers, Eric

Hi Steveh28, C numbers were given out by the German magazine DATZ and Hans Evers. They don't handle this any longer, so Ian Fuller assigns CW numbers on his website corydorasworld.com. Thank you. I was completely unaware of the CW numbers. From what you are saying, is the C numbering system now clos...