Too many Ancistrus! Which is mine?

[flappinganimal]

Hello
Ive joined the forum getting an ID on my Synos and whilst looking over the website I checked out the Ancistrus catelog page. I knew there was a few different types but not that many!
So I was hoping someone could give me an answer to satisfiy my curiosity?
Many thanks

[MatsP]

Ancistrus cf_cirrhosus

, almost certainly - the uncertainty comes from the fact that there are at least a dozen fish that look almost identical. However, if you bought it as a small fish, then it's 99%+ certain that it is the common variety. If it's a mature fish that you bought, it should have said "wild-caught" if it's unusual, and have a price-tag of £20 or so, rather than the common species, where mature fish are around £10-15 at most.

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Mats

[flappinganimal]

Thanks MatsP
He wasnt tiny tiny when I bought him, maybe 2 inches and wasnt that expensive so he must be the common variety as you say. Thanks for that
He is a hansome brute Interesting the way he changes colour depending on lighting, time of day, food available and that kind of thing. Great fish!

[Suckermouth]

Yeah, there are a lot of types of Ancistrus. The genus has needed revision for at least over a decade...

[MatsP]

Yeah, there are a lot of types of Ancistrus. The genus has needed revision for at least over a decade...

Or three decades;)

But I guess that is one of those things that will never get done in one go, as it's such an enormous amount of work to go through the hundred or so described species as well as the undescribed species. Unless someone rich and interested in Ancistrus donates a huge amount of money...

Mind you, Nathan Lujan managed to write 250 pages on the subject of bone structure in the mouth of Loricariidae - it would probably take a bit more than 250 pages to do this work, but perhaps not more than double of that. How many years is a normal PhD degree over?

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Mats

[flappinganimal]

Interesting comments

Have you guys been watching Lost Land Of The Volcano on BBC? They had a cool catfish on there the other day, was it realy as dangerous as they said? Anyway. I was wondering; they are finding new species and taking them to be officialy described (forgive my incorrect lingo) when there is already loads of undescribed species right on their doorsteps (or in their aquariums). Of course they are doing the work in the rain forest to help protect the habitat and animals, and for good tv obviously. It just seems strange to me that they get so excited when they find a new species when there is loads of work to be done on the already found species in an LFS. Have I got the wrong end of the stick here?? Am I making sense?

[MatsP]

You make perfect sense in questioning this. However, when it comes to scientific descriptions, you need to have a known location where th fish was found - ok, so it is possible to describe fish without having a location where the fish can actually be caught again, but generally, it is a good idea to have a wild-capture location.

When it comes to fish in aquariums, it is quite difficult to get a country of capture, never mind GPS coordinates or "two hours by fast boat up from X on river Y", which is the sort of precision that would be needed for a proper scientific description. Yes, there are descriptions which have a type location of "In a aquatic shop in Worcester" or something like that as the type location for a tropical fish. But it's not ideal.

So, whilst the fish are available in the shops, they aren't suitable for scientific description.

I met Mark Sabaj at the CSG (Catfish Study Group) conference in March, and I told him I'd bought some L128 - which is (probably) closely related to

Hemiancistrus subviridis

. They (as I've been told) come in all variants between inky purple and olive green depending on where along the Rio Orinoco they are captured. He had never heard of that, and we had some interesting e-mail conversation afterwards about these and other fish.

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Mats

[racoll]

I think a lot of time they ham it up for the cameras. Make it seem really exciting.

People have no idea how much of nature has not been described by science. There are even undescribed species of fishes wild in the UK!

[MatsP]

To quote the dissertation of Nathan Lujan (link in Science news), the estimate of number of species of fish in the "Neotropical region" (which is mainly South America), there are between 5000 and 8000 different species. The number of described species in this region is 3600, give or take a few. So, there is somewhere between 28% or 55% of the species that are NOT described. 700 of those species are Loricariidae. So a rough estimate would be that there are between 200 and 800 undescribed species of Loricariidae. Mark Sabaj stated that one fish takes about 4 work-months to describe. So 800 months of work, at the very least, just to describe the not yet described species. In fact, there are 369 species in the Cat-eLog that are "undescribed". So with that, we have about 1400 man-months of work to do, just for all plecos that we have in the Cat-eLog (ok, so some of those are probably not technically new species, but still).

I don't know how many people are working on describing Loricariidae - but there's enough work there to keep 12 people busy for 10 years. And that is ONLY the Loricariidae, not counting other catfish families, nor fish from other groups (Characins, Chichlids, Livebearers, Rays, etc).

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Mats

[Suckermouth]

Yeah, there are a lot of types of Ancistrus. The genus has needed revision for at least over a decade...

Or three decades;)

I'll admit I haven't really dug that far into the past in the literature. With a lot of genera it becomes irrelevant with the rate that work is being done in the family Loricariidae. But there are still quite a few species that haven't been worked on since Eigenmann and Steindachner, the latter of which is more annoying since I don't know German...

Mind you, Nathan Lujan managed to write 250 pages on the subject of bone structure in the mouth of Loricariidae - it would probably take a bit more than 250 pages to do this work, but perhaps not more than double of that. How many years is a normal PhD degree over?

Haha, not all 250 pages were about the jaws, although a fair chunk of it was. There's also a chapter studying niche partitioning in loricariid assemblages based on stable isotopes (which is more or less mumbo-jumbo in my mind until I decide to reread that chapter), and a chapter on the geological history of Guyana which is interesting from a biogeography standpoint. I think I heard that a PhD takes about 4 or 5 years to earn on average in our department (which is above average, if I'm not mistaken), however Nathan's took about 7 years, if I'm not mistaken.

[flappinganimal]

Realy interesting.
So who normaly funds the describing of species? Is it universities funding PHD students to do the work? I assume some of you guys have been involved in some scientific studies of catfish?

What a great job the naturalists on The Lost Land Of The Volcano have. Although its probably not as exciting as the editing makes out and very hard work. Just an amazing place to be!

Do they publish the studies on the internet for all to read? I'd be interested to read through a proper scientific study. Not that I'd understand most of it but I'd give it a go

[MatsP]

The studies are indeed funded by universities, museums and other scientific institutions.

Some scientific descriptions are available freely to the general public on the internet. Others are "pay per page", which is the scientific description equivalent of "pay per view" television. And some require a subscription to the publication where the paper of the description is printed - this can be anything from a few dozen to hundreds or even thousands per year.

The "Science news" section posts links to new catfish descriptions. Some are the full description, and others are only the summary (abstract), and you have to pay for the rest of it.

Every so often, the description is ONLY published on paper - but nowadays, that is really rare, as most researchers prefer to have an electronic document.

There is also a selection of old documents here:
http://acsi.acnatsci.org/base/documents.html
They are in original language, so not always in English (in fact even today, there are descriptions written in French or German, but not very often).

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Mats

[racoll]

Do they publish the studies on the internet for all to read? I'd be interested to read through a proper scientific study.

It depends on the journal. Some are free, some are not. Here is an open access description of a new Danio species from Burma, and is a good example of a species description:

http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/2009/f/zt02164p048.pdf

How many years is a normal PhD degree over?

I think I heard that a PhD takes about 4 or 5 years to earn on average in our department (which is above average, if I'm not mistaken), however Nathan's took about 7 years, if I'm not mistaken.

In the UK and Europe, PhDs are typically three years. The discrepancy is all due to the structure of the US education system, which specialises a lot later.

They don't tend to do taught masters degrees, like in the UK, so undergrads go straight into a PhD program. They have classes etc for the first few years of the program, then they begin to do research as well as the usually obligatory teaching. Most PhD students in the UK have a masters degree.

In the UK, you just dive straight into pure research from day one on a PhD, and teaching is encouraged but not mandatory.

[Suckermouth]

I like how I perfectly derailed this topic, but how flappinganimal is still interested.

Yes, funding usually comes from some scientific organization which you apply to. It is a process that is an important part of science, but I'm sure many scientists would prefer not to spend so much time writing grant proposals and just doing science... But to do science you have to have money.

The people on The Lost Land of the Volcano is an organization called Conservation International, if I'm not mistaken. They've got a fair amount of money and they're always looking for new places to find new species and trying to protect as much land as possible for conservation purposes.

Yeah, Zootaxa (http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/content.html) that racoll mentioned is a great place for a number of free articles. It's where I first found science. ;) I've only been in grad school a few weeks, though, so I haven't done much in the way of science, yet.

Indeed, I have heard the European structure of education is quite different. On the other hand, what I have heard is that in Europe the PhD education is quite regimented and you are told what to do, while in the US you are free to choose your topic and you have to work largely independently, which probably contributes to the longer time it takes. I'm considering trying to graduate in 3 years, but that's contingent on choosing a thesis topic and then actually doing the research, which has a way of taking more time than expected.

[racoll]

Indeed, I have heard the European structure of education is quite different. On the other hand, what I have heard is that in Europe the PhD education is quite regimented and you are told what to do,

Pretty much. In the majority of cases the supervisor or PI will apply for a grant in a topic they want to research, and then advertise for a student to complete the research. It will depend on the supervisor on how much input you get in to your research. Often the goals will be presented and the student works out the details.

[Mike_Noren]

In the UK and Europe, PhDs are typically three years. The discrepancy is all due to the structure of the US education system, which specialises a lot later.

I think it varies. Here in Sweden a PhD is 5 years, although I know they are planning to cut down on it because those long education times puts new doctors at a career disadvantage to doctors from countries with shorter education time.
As for the question about who provides funding for describing species, the answer is "hardly anyone". If you're thinking about becoming a fish taxonomist, you should know that taxonomy is a dying science due to worldwide lack of funding, and my advice is to become an ecologist instead. The job market for ecologists is positively vibrant by comparison, and you have a decent chance of getting to work with fish.

[flappinganimal]

Some realy interesting reading there, thanks

And thanks for turning my rather mundaine common BN ID post into such a facinating thread.

[Jon]

"I think I heard that a PhD takes about 4 or 5 years to earn on average in our department (which is above average, if I'm not mistaken)"

that is very, very much above average. here's it's at least six, usually.