Two pleco species from the Xingu River drainage that are popular within the aquarium hobby have finally been scientifically described and given scientific names.

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Paulo & the new Catfish species. Picture by :Nature conservancy

An amazonian catfish, which also happens to be armored, has been discovered and it doesn’t eat the usual thing… Nope, this one eats wood. This interesting catfish will eat wood from logs floating around, or if it gets particularly hungry, even the excrement of its neighboring catfish.

This amazing new species of armored catfish was discovered by Paulo Petry, of Nature Conservancy. Paulo, along with some colleagues, reeled in these interesting catfish a few weeks back when on a scientific expedition to the Fitzgerald Arch. The Fitzgerald arch is one of the most out of the way places in the Peruvian Amazon, and is busting at the seams with different kinds of life, but it is also facing imminent dangers from development projects.

The catfish may not win any beauty pageants, however as Petry has commented “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I have scientist friends who do work on the blobfish, and they think it’s beautiful!”

The largest of these unique creatures reeled in was roughly 65 centimeters, while the other two captured were only about half that size. They were reeled in at the confluence of the Purus and Curanja rivers.

An interesting question is just why this particular catfish is armored. Although, as Petry explains, finding armored catfish in South America isn’t so unusual. “There are 35 different families of catfish on Earth. Armored catfish are unique to South America. They’re the most diverse group of catfish in South America — probably close to 800 species. They’re a fairly evolved, and a very specialized group within catfish.”

However, what is even more astounding is that this particular catfish eats wood. While it is true that there are some variety of fish will dig their way into logs, however finding a fish which actually makes a meal of the substance is a rare find. There are a very small group of catfish which share this wood eating characteristic. Once this catfish mows down on some seemingly non-nutritious wood, it converts the wood cellulose into a different form of sugar, which it then uses.

Apparently, wood eating catfish wouldn’t be as surprising to us if the people who shipped them off to aquariums didn’t half starve them on the way there. “That’s one of the biggest issues when people bring these fish into the aquarium trade — they let them starve for very long times for shipping, the protozoan in their belly dies, and then they can’t digest wood. If you put another fish from the same group that is in good condition in the tank with them, the starving fish will eat the feces of the healthy fish to reinoculate itself with the protozoan, and then it will be able to eat wood and survive.” Petry went on to explain.

Well there you have it… Wood eating catfish are amongst us. Who knows what other unique and interesting creatures we will find?

Blue Catfish

What may be the world’s largest catfish was reeled in by Greg Bernal, from Florissant, and Janet Momphard, of St Charles.

This blue wonder, which was weighed in to be 130 pounds, beat the State record in Misouri by 27 pounds and might just outweigh the world record by 6 pounds.

This is amazing, as blue catfish generally only grow to be between 3 pounds and normally no more than 40 pounds, which suggests that the catfish dragged in had fed on his share of the food supply.

It took the couple around 15 minutes to drag the monstrous catfish toward their tiny fishing boat, kicking and screaming the whole way no doubt. It then took another 30 minutes to land the giant fish, and then only with the aid of two nets could they get the catch into their tiny fishing boat. The fish was caught in the Missouri River, close to the Columbia Bottom conservation area.

In order to catch this amazing catfish, they used a hunk of Asian Carp, which had willingly jumped into their boat, for bait.

There is still a lot of paperwork, and hemming and hawing to be done, before the catch is certified as a world record. However, the Missouri Department of Conservation has commented that there is no doubt at all, that this monstrous catfish broke the world record.

Residents of the Daluo village in China’s Guangxi province have caught several weird looking yellow fishes in a cave lake located 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) below ground.

Experts working at the Bama County and Guangxi provincial aquatics institutes have been unable to indentify the fish, which sports a flat mouth shaped almost like the bill of a duck and eye-catching red lips. The mysterious creature is also adorned with a long, slim “moustache”.

According to Li Zuneng, head of the village, members of his community have heard stories about this outlandish fish told by the oldest villagers, but many had assumed that it was some type of fairytale creature. Up until now, no one from the younger generations had actually seen the deep dweller.

The cave where the fish lives is named Fu Yuan Dong, which means Cave of Fortune.

An aquarium fish has survived seven months in a fish tank without being fed or cared for, since its owner is in police custody after being accused of killing two Chilean students and wounding three others.

When employees from Contractor’s Choice and members of the Summer Lake Homeowners Association walked into the vacant town house at Miramar Beach, Florida, they discovered what appears to be a plecostomus.

The fish was apparently overlooked when lawmen removed the other pets – fish and birds – from the home after the arrest of the pet owner Dannie Baker. The fish went unnoticed for so long because Baker’s home was closed to the homeowners association after the arrest.

“I was very upset because I thought the police had taken everything after Dannie’s arrest,” said Dianne Richmond, vice president of the homeowners association. “This poor fish has been in that boiling house with no air conditioning and nothing to eat for about seven months.”

The pleco was discovered by the fiancée of Contractor’s Choice owner, who noticed something moving in the tank and sprinkled some fish food in the water. This caused the pleco to swim out into the open to feed.

When the pleco was discovered, much of the water in its tank had evaporated and the remaining water had turned dark.

Josh Olis, an account manager at Contractor’s Choice, said he didn’t believe it when his boss told him a fish was still alive in the tank. After seeing it for himself, he and the owner refilled the tank with about 50 gallons of water. He said he will make sure the fish is fed for as long as the company is working in the home. The contractors have even given the fish a name – Theo.

“I think we’re going to accept him into the cleaning family for now,” Olis said. “He’s been living in that tank for so long, surviving off algae. I have so much respect for him, I had to name him.”

The employees at Contractor’s Choice are now looking for a permanent home for Theo.

“This poor fish has really worked for a new home,” Richmond said. “It’s a wonder he’s survived this.”

AC Comment

Although I certainly don’t recommend neglecting your plecos for seven months, I’m not very surprised that Theo was alive and kicking when they found him. Many of the catfish species commonly referred to as plecos are algae-eaters (especially when young), so if there was any light coming into the room, Theo probably had some food to eat since nobody was there scrubbing away the algae. It all comes down to how large the tank is; a big tank may generate enough algae to keep a pleco alive (albeit hungry and malnourished) for several months.

Also, the natural habitat of plecos is Central and South America, so living without air conditioning in Florida is probably not something that bothered Theo much, especially if the aquarium was placed in a location where it was sheltered from sunlight during the harshest hours of the day.

Evaporation on the other hand, that is a real threat. The build up of waste in the water was probably tolerated by Theo since the progress was slow and gradual, but eventually ending up with hardly any water due to evaporation would naturally have killed him.

Last but not least, a word of caution. Although the employees of Contractor’s Choice acted admirably and should be applauded for taking such an interested in an abandoned fish, giving Theo 50 gallons of new water was actually quite risky since such a rapid change of water quality (and probably also temperature) can be lethal to fish – especially if the tap water is also heavily chlorinated. (But this is naturally impossible to know unless you’re an aquarist so I don’t mean to sound condescending here.) If you find a neglected fish, the safest method is to gradually change water quality and temperature until conditions are ideal for that particular species.

The Floridian town of Wellington used to spend nearly 7,000 USD a month of taxpayer funds to keep the stagnant pools of foreclosed homes sanitary. Not anymore however, since they have enlisted the aid of some very unusual pool boys – algae eating catfish.

At a typical home, officials now drop 15 catfish in the pool instead of using chemicals to keep the water clear.

“Some of us got clever and decided to try the algae eating fish,” code enforcement officer Debra Mitchell told NBC affiliate WPTV-5.

Mitchell hopes that cleaner and more sanitary pools, combined with the lower fees for upkeep, will make the foreclosed Wellington houses more attractive to buyers.

Specimens of the invasive Blue catfish (Ictalurus furcatus) have now grown large enough to reach the top of the food chain in James River, Virginia. A catfish weighing 102 lbs (46 kg) was caught from the river not long ago; the largest caught freshwater fish ever to be reported from Virginian waters.

30 years ago, Blue catfish was deliberately introduced to this U.S. river as a game fish. During recent years, the catfish population has grown explosively while many other fish species have decreased. An eight year old Blue catfish normally weigh a mere 4 lbs (1.8 kg), but as soon as it gets large enough to start catching other fish and devouring fully grown crabs, it begins putting on weight at a rapid pace and can gain as much as 10 lbs (4.5 kg) a year.

Blue Catfish – Ictalurus furcatus. Copyright www.jjphoto.dk

According to Bob Greenlee, a biologist with the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, scientists doing sampling used to get around 1,500 catfish in an hour in this river in the 1990s. Today, this number has increased to 6,000. “We have an invasive species that is taking over the ecosystem,” says Rob Latour, a marine biologist with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William and Mary.

The members of the genus Synodontis, commonly known as the squeaker catfishes of Lake Tanganyika, evolved from a single common ancestor according to a paper* published in a recent issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

synodontis catfish

Researchers Day, Bills and Friel** analysed 1697 base-pair sequences consisting of nuclear (ribosomal protein-codin gene S7), mitochondrial (cytochrome b) and transfer RNA gene fragments in 65 samples (representing about 40 species) of squeaker catfishes to study the evolutionary relationships of the group.

Through their research, the authors were able to track down a single origin for the Lake Tanganyika species flock. The members of the genus Synodontis all evolved within the last 5.5 million years which makes them a comparatively new addition to this Great Rift Valley Lake which is believed to be at least 9 million, perhaps even 12 million, years old.

Day, Bills and Friel also recovered a monophyletic group of southern African riverine species which seems to have diversified very rapidly (during the last 890,000 years). This group was believed to have been formed due to adaptive radiation within Lake Makgadikgadi; a lake which is now extinct.

* Day, JJ, R Bills & JP Friel (2009) Lacustrine radiations in African Synodontis catfish. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22, pp. 805–817.

**Julia Day, Roger Bills and John Friel

The catfish L239 has finally been described by science and given a proper name: Baryancistrus beggini. Ichthyologists Lujan, Arce and Armbruster described the species in a paper[1] published in the journal Copeia[2].

Baryancistrus beggini lives in Venezuela and Colombia; in Rio Guaviare and at the confluence of Rio Ventuari and Rio Orinoco. The researchers found the fish in crevices amongst boulders. By analysing stomach contents, they were able to learn that this catfish feeds on periphyton and associated microfauna growing on rocks. (Periphyton is a mixture of algae, heterotrophic microbes, cyanobacteria, and detritus that can be found attached to submerged surfaces, e.g. stones, in most underwater ecosystems.)

In the aquarium trade, L239 is known as Blue panaque or Blue-fin panaque. The name beggini was given by Lujan and his colleagues in honour of Chris Beggin, the owner of an aquarium fish store in Nashville, USA who funded the research. The species has been placed in the genus Baryancistrus, but this might have to be corrected in the future as we learn more about the tribe Ancistrini.

Baryancistrus beggini sports a uniformly dark black to brown base colour with a blue sheen and the abdomen is naked. Along each side of the body you can see a distinctive keel above the pectoral finns; a keel formed by the strongly bent first three to five plates of the midventral series. The body also features two to three symmetrical and ordered predorsal plate rows and the last dorsal-fin ray is connected to the adipose fin.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Siluriformes
Family: Loricariidae
Subfamily: Hypostominae
Tribe: Ancistrini
Genus: Baryancistrus

New species: Baryancistrus beggini

A new species of catfish belonging to the genus Lithogenes has been described by ichthyologists Scott Schaefer and Francisco Provenzano in a recent issue of the journal American Museum Novitates[1].

The new fish has been given the name Lithogenes wahari, after Ruá-Wahari, the Piaroapeople’s God of Creation[2]. The species is known from the Cuao River, a part of the Orinoco River drainage, where it inhabits clear and swift forest streams with exposed bedrock substratum. It was actually collected over 20 years ago by anthropologist Stanford Zent, but it would take until 2001 before the fish was found again by Scott Schaefer and Francisco Provenzano.

Lithogenes wahari is the third scientifically described member of the small genus Lithogenes and can be distinguished from its two close relatives by the absence of odontodes on the proximal portion of the ventral surface of the first pelvic-fin ray, the lack of accessory premaxillary teeth, the extensive ridges present on the thickened skin of the pelvic pad, and the intense pigment band that runs along the base of the anal fin. There is also a diffuse spot located midlength on the anal fin rays.

Interestingly enough, the new information on this Lithogenes member has led ichthyologists to suggest that the common ancestor of the Loricariidae and Astroblepidae was a fish capable of climbing rocks by grasping them with its mouth and pelvic fins.

Picture here