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I just noticed one of my petricola has these big white spots behind his gills. Identical on both sides. Seems healthy otherwise. Still eating a lot, very active, nothing out of the ordinary that I can tell. Water parameters are all spot on.

PH 8.2
GH 10
KH 11
0 Ammonia
0 Nitrite
About 10 ppm Nitrate

Anyone seen anything like this? Any idea what it could be?

Sorry, not a great pic. Impossible to grab a decent pic of any of the lunatics in this tank. The white spots are slightly more prominent than in this pic.

I can't say I've ever seen this before on any of my synos or met with this in forums, etc.

It was gone by the next day.

Sounds like possibly some kind of mood indicator then?

Hi I realize this thread is a few months old and I'm not a regular around here but happened across this thread and can say I saw this before in my petricola/lucipinnis I kept around 10 years ago. The marks would come and go, sometimes look faint like the picture above, sometimes a much more opaque white. I eventually witnessed aggression between individuals and that particular spot was where they would bite/latch on when skirmishing amongst themselves. The picture above looks identical to the marks I would see, so I'd say it's highly probable those marks are bites/scratches/abrasions due to infighting between individual petricola/lucipinnis.

I've been away from the hobby for about 9 years but I'm in progress of getting a new setup and plan to try a group of the larger multipunctatas/grandiops synos (it's why I popped in here today) rather than the petricola/lucipinnis because of this specific issue. I unfortunately did not have success keeping the petricola/lucipinnis. I had at least 6 of them in a 125g setup with mbuna, and eventually all the petricola/lucipinnis were killed but 1. Killed by aggression amongst themselves, not by the mbuna, IMO and IME.