Which is this fish ?

[Fundulopanchax76]

Hi ! I saw a fish in a site which is similar to L 397 but his tail pattern is different ! What is it ?

[bekateen]

The scribbled face says Panaqolus, and the spotted tail reminds me of

Panaqolus sp(l206)

or maybe

Panaqolus sp(l271)

. But I don't know if there are any other Panaqolus with spotted tails. That's a beautiful fish!

Cheers, Eric

[bekateen]

Follow-up. Using Google Image search, I discovered that the original source of this photo may be here: http://aquafin.jp/blog/?p=7180

The website purports that the fish in the photo above is amongst a group of plecos they call "Allenker Red Labyrinth Tiger" plecos (

L397

is also nicknamed Alenquer tiger).

But there is a lot of variation in the fish on that page:

One fish looks like a perfectly normal L397:


Then there is the fish above with a spotted tail:


And finally there is one at the bottom of the page with a labyrinth pattern - doesn't resemble L397 at all; but if the same species, it could be a genetic mutant color form, or even a congenital abnormality in color.


So thinking back to the original photo at the top of this thread, maybe the fish is an L397, but its spotted tail is just extreme individual variation... I'm just speculating.

In response to my query about this, Andreas Tanke posted on Facebook that there are several different undescribed Alenquer tiger Panaqolus, so I'd guess this fish with the spotted tail is out of that area but might not be L397. But on the other hand, he also said that he knows of no other Panaqolus (besides

L206

) with a consistently spotted tail, and he said this is not L206.

Cheers, Eric