Have you tried either Aquabid.com or WetSpot Tropical fish (http://wetspottropicalfish.com/index.php/fish)? WetSpot is in Portland, which is pretty far away from you, so you probably don't want to drive there (although to be honest, that is an amazing fish store, so if you want to have a fun "f...

What does the dark background do? I have those on my other tanks but some came that way. Hi JeanPro, The dark background simply gives the animals a sense of security. With a bright, wide-open tanks (like yours), the bright backgrounds are thought to amplify the fish's feeling of exposure and vulner...

Wish I could be there. Everyone, enjoy a drink, have good conversation, get to know somebody new, show grace to a stranger, and hopefully you'll get to buy some catfishes that you won't see again for a while. Cheers, Eric P.S., From Keep the date , Wow, what a cute little worm on a hook! That's awes...

I'm not sure how others feel, but I tend to do this with my caves. Although I don't elevate the front too much, I place a small flat stone under the entrance to slightly elevate it. This way, if a male is keeping eggs, he is less likely to push them out. But if you do this, you do have to be careful...

Do you mean something like this? Slanted with the back end buried slightly in the substrate, with the mouth of the cave elevated compared to the back?

Can you return it to the store and get another maccus? (or get store credit to come back later and get maccus if the store has none now ?) Unless you want it for itself, and you're willing to accept a lone individual of this spp., don't keep it. I imagine that you'll have trouble getting more if thi...

Costa-Silva, G.J., Rodriguez, M.S., Roxo, F.F., Foresti, F., & Oliveira, C. 2015. Using Different Methods to Access the Difficult Task of Delimiting Species in a Complex Neotropical Hyperdiverse Group. PLoS ONE, 10 (9), e0135075. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0135075 . The genus Rineloricaria is a N...

I've never given much thought to "leafy" veggies. Interesting. Thank you. How much of a single Brussels sprout will be consumed? How much gets thrown away?

From another thread, Re: Frozen vegetables for clown plecos : I cannot say it applies to clowns, but my first bristlenose spawned in white PVC caves. This lasted until they got too big to fit in a 1 inch diameter cave. I discovered this when I found the egg mass out of the cave against the front gla...

Thanks TTA. Cheers, Eric

UPDATE: The fry have just been hiding out in the parents' tank. There is so much wood, and so many hiding places, that I really don't see much of the juveniles, except an occasional glimpse. But just after a water change and vacuuming today, I managed to catch a look at a pretty good-sized (at least...

Thanks, Kostas. Don't worry about being late.

Cheers, Eric

IMHO, all maccus. Is the fish in question smaller than the others? I would expect wider, more contrasting stripes in younger maccus.

The Family Noctilionidae bats are linked to aquatic ecosystems, due to their eating habits. These bats make low flights over the water surface (Tirira, 2007). The lesser bulldog bat is a bat that eat insects associated with aquatic ecosystems, such as beetles, bugs, flies, dragonflies, mayflies and...

Did you try some higher CO2 levels, yet? ... Some said they used some soda to start spawning. Apparently I know very little about otos because mine always die within 1-4 months of purchase. But to your point of CO2 and soda, whenever I hear that I am always suspicious that the real factor is not th...

Why, Matthew, you are spot on with regard to figure 1: http://www.auburn.edu/academic/science_ ... elepis.pdf

And the paper doesn't even cite the Armbruster & Hardman publication. Yikes.

Regards, Eric

Neon, This post may have gone overlooked because it is in the wrong forum. Bristlenoses are a type of loricariid; some members and guests here preferentially check for new posts only within the forums that interest them, which in this case would be the "South American Catfishes (Loricariidae - ...

That was exactly my thought, although I couldn't remember which species or L number looked like that. Unfortunately, it is not clear from the paper that the fish in Figure 1 was actually used in the study, versus the authors simply using this photo as a "representative" photo of pardalis (...

After reading the paper, I found no mention of where the fish came from or how they were ID'd; the materials and methods are silent in this regard. The paper includes two images of what the authors call Pterygoplichthys pardalis , although it is not clear to me that the photo of a live fish is actua...

I don't know, but I imagine that, as long as you stay within Ancistrus cf_cirrhosus , you will potentially find long fin variants of just about every possible color morph. As I understand it, the long fin condition is a simple genetic mutation, so if anyone bothers to breed a long finned adult with ...

Okay, then that's a puzzler for me. If the side odontodes are most important for sexing, then the genital papillae are just distracting. Otherwise, I would have said your male is a female and your female a male based on the papillae.

I guess you can't trust my judgment in this case.

Eric

In both pairs of photos, the upper fish looks like a female - its wider midbody and in particular its genital papilla. The lower fish appears to be a male, with regard to his genital papilla, and it has the slightly thinner body. From the dorsal view, odontodes are bigger on the male too. The only c...

Ebenstein, D., Calderon, C., Troncoso, O. P., & Torres, F. G. 2015. Characterization of dermal plates from armored catfish Pterygoplichthys pardalis reveals sandwich-like nanocomposite structure. Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 45, 175–182. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/...

Hi asian_bumblebeecat, Good luck with your breeding project. it seems males arnt only more slender but also posses elongated anal fin Are you referring to genital papillae, or actually the anal fin (compare this photo on the CLOG page: http://www.planetcatfish.com/common/image.php?species=pseudomyst...

Okay, I just realized something very important that I left off of my summary report, and that is date of the spawning (by the way, this would be one of the parameters which would be more valuable if members can register multiple independent spawns for the same species). With date of spawning analyze...

Thanks for the pictures. Yes, I agree that the look of a wood kiln should enhance the appearance of the caves, in particular I would describe it as a more weathered look, giving the caves a less manicured appearance. There probably are wood fired kilns near me, so I'll keep asking around. I contacte...

Hi AdamTill, You have two very nice tanks and some neat fish. Good luck with your spawning efforts. Alas, I don't often see reports of spawning otos, although I know some people have had success. Have you read this article? http://www.planetcatfish.com/shanesworld/shanesworld.php?article_id=256 Plea...

I can imagine my fish hiding in the black donut-shaped cave. I like the Easter Island head. Are the statues just decor, or are there caves hidden inside? Cool.

I often read that caves should be about twice the length of the fish, so that a male can fit inside and also trap a female (This explains why I am making my caves so long). This certainly describes my clown plecos - they bury themselves so deep in their caves that I can almost NOT see them when they...

I would agree with you, that they all appear to have odontodes on the body, so you probably have 3 males. I don't think that anyone ever wants to have all of one sex together, in particular all males. So to be honest, I don't know if the aggression will go down or not. I would think that if the tank...