"how many cat fish lovers are there in planetcatfish members circle."
If you look at the bottom of the Forum screen, it says how many registered members there are, if that's what you're after. Some 3-4000 if memory serves me right.
"how many varites of cat availlable in india"
Depends on what you mean by "available". To purchase from fish shops? Haven't got a clue, but almost certainly hundreds.
Or how many species are native to india? If you look at
http://www.fishbase.org, they have a "information by country/region", where you can enter India as the region. Doing this, and looking at families Siluridae, Sisoridae, Bagridae and possibly a couple of others, I found that there are a few dozen different catfish native to India.
"which are rare amoung this"
I can't answer that, but I'm sure someone else can.
"is there any such variety known to be as most precious,amoung aquarium cats."
Again, this depends on what you refer to: From the ones native to India, or across the world? In the world, there are about 2500 different species of catfish, some of which are very sought after in the market. For example, Hypancistrus Zebra will fetch prices that are in the hundreds of US dollars, even for babies. This is because it's a rare (not available in wild-caught due to export restrictions from Brazil), and it's got striking colouration which makes it a very attractive fish in the aquarium trade.
There are certainly other fish that are both rare and sought after, although I'd have a hard time enumerating those. I don't think many of the Indian native species would be among the "top 100" of most sought after in the aquarium trade.
Several of the native species are certainly unsuitable for the regular aquarium, and will require rather large volumes of water to be kept. Others are very small, and can be kept in aquariums, such various Hara spp.
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Mats
