sapphire wrote:... Chaetostoma Dupouii looks very close to him, Dorsale does to, but that one doesnt show the same markings on the tail as mine
Hi sapphire,
From the photos you have of your fish, the tail markings are consistent with
dorsale too, in my opinion. Please check closely all the different photos of
dorsale on the CLOG page (
) and I think you'll be able to see that. If you think the tails really do look different, please try to get better photos of your own fish, especially their tail, and we can have another go at them.
sapphire wrote:i am not familiar with how readily available each sub is, esp in the big box stores...he was the only one they had, so i could be way off base
The big box stores typically order
, and they sometimes sell them under the incorrect names
or
Chaetostoma thomasi (which isn't even a thing, but is only a misspelling of
thomsoni!). But if you look closely, you can often find
C. dorsale mixed in with
C. formosae. Although their spotting patterns are essentially the reverse of each other (
formosae has dark spots and dark lines on a light body, and
dorsale has light spots and light lines on a dark body), their colors are usually washed out in the stores and they look very similar to the untrained eye. When I've seen them in PetSmarts and Petcos, I would estimate that I found the two species in a roughly 50%-50% mix, or perhaps slightly more
formosae than
dorsale. But the stores sold both as the same fish and most of the store clerks didn't even realize there were two different species in the store aquaria.
If you want to read a nightmare story, look at this thread:
Mystery Chaetostoma, impulse buy at PetSmart. It is my own efforts to build a group of
C. dorsale from fish I found at PetSmarts and Petcos in California. In the end, I got 13 or 14 fish (if you count returns of dead fish and their replacements) and all of mine died in a couple of weeks. I hope you have a better experience, because I think
C. dorsale is a really neat rubberlip and I hope to have more one day with better success.
Cheers, Eric
