Species Natural habitats?

[alec1986]

hi there!!
im very new to the website but have found exactly what im looking for!!
i have got one suggestion that i think some of your readers may be interested in Though...
i know some of the species have got their ideal water conditions on their pages, but wouldnt it be great if you could have a heading on each page letting you know what kind of conditions (fast current, blackwater, oxygen levels) the fish thrive in, its great for biotope fans like me!
let me know what you think, and thanks for all the info ive got from the site!!
Alec

[MatsP]

This has been discussed before, and yes, it would be fairly easy to add fields to the database to indicate those sort of things. The HARD part is to find which fish is liking what conditions. There are some obvious cases where it's easy to say, but most of the time, it's darn difficult to find the correct temperature, never mind pH, GH, KH, flow-rate, oxygen level, etc, etc. I have spent many hours filling in empty fields in the database -such as temperatures, which river the fish is from and so on. But with 2100 entries in the Cat-eLog, spending even 10 seconds on each means that it's around 6 hours - and as you can understand, it may well take more than 10 seconds to just find the fish in fishbase or some other database. If you have to look it up in a book, then it's probably minutes rather than seconds for each fish.

And that assumes that there is some place we can get the data from in the first place - we have 730 species that do not have a temperature rating. I'm sure that they are documented somewhere, but it's not easy to find this information. And that is a slightly "easier" than biotope/habitat type information.

If you [and that applies to ALL members of PlanetCatfish] feel that some particular fish has insufficient information [and you feel that you have valuable and correct information to provide, or can point to some reliable information elsewhere], then feel free to post it in this "Site Suggestions and Bugs" forum.

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Mats

[Jools]

The way to do this is by adding the data to the body of fresh water where it exists. That said, I don't think it's a great idea. The conditions in a particular biotope can often be seasonably variable and if I tried to keep fishes in captivity in some of the conditions I've collected in them in the wild, I'd have a lot of dead fish.

SO, it can be added, anecdotally if necessary, to various species as required but no more than that. As such I do not see the need for a new feature.

Jools

[MatsP]

Whilst I agree with both your statement of how this would be done and the conclusion, I have a feeling there was another discussion some time ago about "habitat", where the lines where more along the lines of what the actual habitat of the fish is - such as Corydoras mainly living in small drainages, often over sandy bottom, and Chaetostoma in hill-streams with high flow-rate and bigger, rounded, stones.

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Mats

[Jools]

Indeed, and that's the one I've just commented on and kept "live". For now.

Jools