Jobro wrote:... Still, the main problem is: when people posts pictures as a reference, it's usually plecos in very good shape and condition and with obvious sexual dimorphism... Best thing would be making detailed shots of plecos in bad condition or youngsters and update those in intervals of like 2 months. So when they are gravid, mature and easy to sex, you can look back in time and maybe find some hints to sexing bad conditioned plecos.
True, this would be very valuable if an animal's sexual maturation could be "tracked," so that we could look for hints of gender as body features matured, and use the knowledge to look backwards for early signs of gender before the obvious mature traits have developed. Since certain distinctive traits (such as odontodes) probably won't have developed yet, this may come down to careful morphometric analysis, such as relative body proportions.
But one (minor) problem would be fear of shame - who wants to show off their fish in bad condition???
Right?
No, seriously, what you suggest is a good idea. Although I didn't have that goal in mind, the start of this thread does begin with some earlier photos of the first three clowns I had. But at that time, I didn't think to take photos from all three angles (dorsal, lateral, ventral). Obviously, even then other PC members could already sex them as one female, two males. But that wasn't yet apparent to me, and even others expressed concern about one of the males because his odontodes weren't well developed. And even in my latter photos, look how "thin" fish #3 was, even though it was a female; and she even had some slight dorso-lateral odontodes, and that totally fooled me.
When my
Hemiancistrus guahiborum arrive, I'll follow your advice and attempt get a series of photos when I bring them home (presumably they will be too young to sex easily, and they might be in mediocre condition after all the transport from wholesaler to the LFS), then I'll give updates as they age.
Jobro wrote:... But it's not always easy to distinguish the individuals. One would have to keep them in separated tanks or create a tank with many "subtanks" inside. Quite a lot of additional work needed.
Hopefully it won't need to be so complicated. If we take the time to get photos which show identifying markings (spotting patterns, stripes, etc.), then hopefully months later we can go back to the fish, photograph them, and use their markings to correlate the new photos with the old photos. That may prove tricky, especially if color patterning is really immature at the time of the first photos. I have to be honest and say that my clown plecos look the same to me, and that's a pretty sad statement, given that as part of my training I'm supposed to be able to use natural markings to identify specific individuals from one another.... yeah, sad.
Jobro wrote:Offtopic:
I read in a different post of yours, where you're trying to sex some fish and your taking orange pigmentation around the vents into consideration for sexing females. My L260s would occasionally show those orange/yellow spots on their vents. But I could wipe it off with my finger. It sometimes would return and sometimes not. I actually only tried wiping it off because I watched it suddenly becoming orange out of nowhere. I'm pretty sure it was the plecos pee. xD I have seen this on quite some hyps happening since then. They will pee out of fear if you turn them around. You can wipe it away with your finger. It looks exactly like the orange vents some L134 are showing on pictures in the web. Not sure, but this pee might be no good way of deciding on genders. At least you should try wiping it away before relying on it. Maybe some species are really orange. But it was pee on my L260s... pretty sure.
Thanks for reading the other thread. You may have noticed that I haven't actually gotten the fish yet; my LFS owner tells me they'll arrive in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out what traits to look for, and yes, the yellow coloration around the genital papillae is an interesting possibility. So in your fish, that yellow can be wiped off, eh? Speaking as a biologist (and not just as a fish keeper), I would be surprised if fish urine would be so colorful, so what you observed may not be actual urine. However, if it does disappear, it could still be some kind of secretion/excretion (but just not urine
per se). Even so, it might still be gender specific, if females produce more of this secretion than do males. Alternatively, it may be that the yellow is in fact a pigmentation of the skin and not merely a yellow fluid outside the body; but by "wiping" the body with your finger, you may temporarily cause the coloration to disappear (just as is the case when you press your finger forcefully against your skin - the pressure pushes blood and interstitial fluid out of the underlying tissue, and for a few seconds the skin appears pale or "off-color," before eventually returning to normal). So if you do examine your L260s again, and you try the wipe test to remove the yellow color, try this: continue to observe the skin around the cloaca/genital papilla for a few seconds to see if the yellow color returns. Just an idea.
Cheers, Eric
right?
(Sorry, I realize that most of them are visible only as belly-shots, since they're sucking the glass, and the largest in the photo, which is NOT on the glass, happens to have its body blocked by another fish... but that's the best photo I was able to get.)
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