COTM peppered oto

[andywoolloo]

Such a great article, I never knew there were peppered otos!! so cool how they mimic the cories and how the cories school and gulp with them!! thank you Mike! Really enjoyed it !

[Jools]

Yes, it was a good article for several reasons. Well written and supplied in time for a month deadline. I also enjoyed reading it and it makes some good "food for thought" observations.

Jools

[Mike_Noren]

Thanks for the kind words!
I promised to write a COTM article about them ages ago, and finally got around to it, but upon reading it now I realize I should have made a second pass through it and cleaned up the language and also made it more consistent (e.g. Cories/Corys).

They're definitely interesting fish. Probably most of our fish have some sort of symbiotic relationship with other species, but I think this is the first I've kept where it was known which species it cooperated with and that species was available.

When I first heard about them being mimics I wondered if that was really true, to me they looked completely different than a Peppered Cory - but when they're out and about it's near impossible to tell them apart at a quick glance. Looking for the shiny white ocular diverticulum was the fastest way for me to spot the Otos among the fish milling around in typical Corydoras manner, which is what made me wonder if that might not be its actual purpose?
Also the way they dominated the Cories was very un-Oto-like, and very interesting. Are these traces of aggression vestigial behavior from the ancestor of Otos, or something which has evolved in the mimics? If evolved, that raises the question how mimics would benefit from having a dominant position in the group?

Also interesting, although I was never able to investigate this myself, are the questions surrounding the breeding. There's evidence that presence of breeding Cories trigger breeding in the Otos, which on the face of it seems to make sense as it's a mimic - but the Oto young do not look like young Cories, and reportedly are not found with Cories in nature, so why synchronize breeding cycles?
Also, are young Peppered Cories less well-protected than the adults, or why do the young Peppered Otos not mix with them for protection?

To me part of the appeal of the Peppered Oto was that, like that video with that huge school of thousands of Pterygoplichthys, it reminded me how little we really know about our fish.

[Richard B]

I must concur it is very well written & thought provoking (about a super little fish which sadly is not seen as often as it used to be).

In terms of mimics, i am now kicking myself for not studying them harder & recording details of my group of

Brachyrhamdia imitator

&

Corydoras brevirostris

, many years ago....

[Jools]

The corys cories thing was my edit - house style if nothing else - and I will go and see if I missed some and correct it.

Jools