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I am trying to find out how long my red tail catfish can be kept in a 55 gallon tank i got him when he was roughly 3 inches and he is now 7 it has been 4 months or so and i have the means to get a large tank such as a 123 or 150 but how long can i wait to get the bigger tank. any one who knows please help.



thanks for anything
bill [/img]

well, a red tail catfish gets to about the size of 9 -12 inches in captivity, its growth rate is a bit slower as it gets larger, i'd say yours doesn't have too much to grow but if you want it to reach its max then i'd say you should go ahead and get the larger tank now, and keep it with similar size tank buddies

redtails get ALOT bigger than 9 inches, they will need a huge tank or pond, if hes growing an inch a month than two more months and i would get him a bigger tank.

does anyone have any recomendations as to what size tank to get? i have been told that a 125gallon was ok but i have also been told that you need atleast a 250gallon

heh, really?? my friend had an adult Red Tail and it was only about 11 inches long, he's had it for about 3 years and it never got any bigger, so how much bigger will it get???

my brother in law had a rtc that after 4 or so years was around 36 inches, but i have been told that can be a exception. if you look around on the internet you can find pictures of them topping 40 inches fairley regulary if they where raised in a large tank. that is why i am trying to find people who have had experience so as to find out what size tank you really need. so far mine is still in a 55 and doing well. but how much longer he will stay in that tank is yet to be seen.

than what kind of cat does my friend have? its got a white lateral stripe and a white belly, red tinted tail blueish head with some dark circular spots on it with some really long whiskers, about 11 inches long as well and a very broad head... maybe a puruvian red tail catfish

Sounds like a RTC. Did you check against the Cat-eLog?

yah but i just couldn't find it anywhere, or at least not one that looks like it, the one i saw is alot more beautiful than those other ones in the cat - e- log

red tails get huge i have a 360 gallon that i had a 24 inch red tail in and it was like a bull in a china cabinet . they are very powerful fish and can push rocks and decoration into your tank walls and scratch them all up (if glass possibly brake ). in my opinion if you want to keep it happy and not suffer you should get a 500 gallon or bigger and dont waste your money trying to do these little step-ups ( 55 to 125 to 180 to 500.....)it would be cheaper for you to send it back to south america and have someone let it go down there

redtail cats can attain a length of 3-4 feet even in captivity if given proper diet and space,, mine is in a 400gal pond. It is currently 24"

just curious, in another thread here I thought I saw that there were 2 types of RTC's. I personally had only ever known of 1, but thought I might try to clarify what I had read.

Is there 1 species or 2 or RTC's.?
Thanks.

There is the South American RTC (<i>Phractocephalus hemioliopterus</i>) and the Asian RTC (<i>Hemibagrus wyckioides</i>). Other than growing to large sizes and having red tails, they're as different as night and day.

Methinks there's three. The African RTC is Synodontis clarias and is much more feasible than the other two, if you want a catfish with a red tail. Unfortunately it's much harder to get.

Well...except that <i>S. clarias</i> isn't regularly known as the RTC in the aquarium trade.

There are Red Tailed Catfish and there are red tailed catfish. As Silurus says, there are only two of the former, but there are probably dozens of the latter.

So to enliven this discussion, do all red tails come from xanthins in crustaceans?

Dinyar

I read somewhere--don't remember where--that some S. American RTCs have pink tails. Feeding colour foods doesn't make the tail any redder, so the colour may be innate.

Supposedly, catfish can't see the colour red, so why do so many have red tails?

My Asian RTC possibly gets its red tail from my red blood cells when I hand feed it.

I don't think catfishes cannot see red, they just have a decreased sensitivity to colors (including red) because their retinas have more rods and fewer cones.
As for the red finnage, this probably developed so as to make the fish less visible to underwater predators. The fins are the most mobile part of the fish and since red light is the most easily absorbed in the upper layers of the water column, the fins would appear black to other organisms at depth.
This is just a hypothesis and needs testing, though.

Actually there's a nice African cat wich does have a truly red tail too: Synodontis clarias. Unfortunately it seems to be very rare, but according to pix, this one qualifies too as a Red Tail.

Sid, that point has already been made. See five posts above.

So to enliven this discussion, do all red tails come from xanthins in crustaceans?

No, but I found out today that if you feed <i>Hassar</i> a constant diet of carotene-rich food (Tetra Bits), they develop a strong rusty tinge to their color. I now have a slightly orange <i>Hassar</i> thanks to my laziness.

In the Welsatlas SEIDEL/EVERS state that L10a that arent fed with crustaceans at young age become brown instead of the normal red color.

That makes sense, allright. A lot of fishes don't get their proper colors if they're missing essential parts of their diet. Another famous example is the Leleupi (a very yellow fish) from Tanganyika, wich turns ugly mottled brown when fed with the wrong food.

Carotenes play a major role in a lot of fish pigments, and especially cyclops and daphnia are carotene rich foods. So luckily it's a very easy to solve "problem" as these aren't hard to get at all (deepfreeze works almost as good as live ones)