The Most Hardy Fish

  • Get the NEW AquariaCentral iOS app --> http://itunes.apple.com/app/id1227181058 // Android version will be out soon!

RENEGADE

the one and only RENEGADE
Mar 19, 2003
403
0
0
Los Angeles CA
Visit site
a Crab

Edit: oh a "fish"...... my CAE is tuff but i hear they get 10" so..... i got a ghost catfish hes doing good! (BTW i have a 10g, 8.0ph, hard water)i made a newbie mistake and got my fish home and put them in my tank right away and those were the ones that survied(sp?) (my tetras didn't:()
 
Last edited:

ChilDawg

Math is sexy.
Dec 26, 2002
4,249
0
36
42
Byron and Normal (IL)
hometown.aol.com
I concur with Wetman on this one...why, exactly, do you want to know what the hardiest fish are?
 

ChilDawg

Math is sexy.
Dec 26, 2002
4,249
0
36
42
Byron and Normal (IL)
hometown.aol.com
Okay...I wanted to be sure because there are some people who get that sort of advice so they can keep fish in substandard conditions!

I'd go with bettas and cories for that tank, and then three otos once the tank is more established and needs algae control.

I apologize for assuming the worst. I am glad to hear that my assumptions were unfounded.
 

ChilDawg

Math is sexy.
Dec 26, 2002
4,249
0
36
42
Byron and Normal (IL)
hometown.aol.com
I'm actually going to refer you to some websites on them in a few minutes, as soon as I find them again. I could explain, but there are great resources out there, and I'll let them talk for me. Plus, you get the added benefit of having great resources for all sorts of things given to you. I hope that you don't mind.
 

ChilDawg

Math is sexy.
Dec 26, 2002
4,249
0
36
42
Byron and Normal (IL)
hometown.aol.com
Wetman, I hope that you don't mind, but I love your Oto section...Wetman has one of the best sites for beginners: www.skepticalaquarist.com This is from there:

Otocinclus spp. Mixed-species stocks of Otos are usually imported, so all the Otos here are being given their conventional "trade" names. Identifying Otos at the species level depends on professional techniques, like accurate counts of scales along the lateral line, or details of the dentition and the body armor, and symptomatic ratios of one body measurement to another. The details we amateurs might pick out, for instance minute differences in patterning, such as the blotch on their caudal peduncle, are less useful.

One distinction is clear at the species level, anyway. Otocinclus doesn't have an adipose fin. If your Oto has an adipose fin, it's one of the fourteen species of Parotocinclus. A commonly-seen one is Parotocinclus maculicaudatus, a "Golden Oto" with brown blotches along the lateral line and a lasrger blotch on the caudal peduncle. The leading rays of dorsal, pectoral or caudal fins are red with brown banding, a feature you might not detect til you get a chance to photograph your Otos.

You know that Otos spend most of their waking lives working their way across algal films. If they have the security of floating plants nearby, they'll even work the underside of the surface film that forms on still waters. It's a lipid layer to which algal cells and bacteria tend to stick, attracting plankton animals. So our little herbivores are getting a more balanced diet than you might think.

Otocinclus have three familiar behavior patterns: they feed, as I described; they do a skittering chaotic scramble that is hard to follow, like a butterfly's unpredictable flight, which could be a handy evasive activity with some practical survival value. And they "freeze." If you've ever seen a cryptically-patterned butterfly come to rest on rough gray bark, fold its wings and virtually disappear, you'll sense how useful it is for an Oto to "freeze" on a slender waterlogged branch, say one about as big around as he is, and similarly disappear. LoMax13, posting from Gainesville FL at aquariacentral a while ago, had this to say: "What's up with that mad dash thing? It's like they're having a panic attack. They move around like— 'oh crap i can't find enough algae. I'm going to die! Oh...OK here's some more right here. Whew.'" (I just had to pass this on.) Otos will also 'play dead:' Jinlong, Mission Viejo CA, noted:

"When I initially added the otos to the 40g, one of the baby angels decided to suck an oto off the side of the tank. He pulled it off by the dorsal fin! As he did, another angel came up and grabbed the poor oto by the TAIL! The two angels then played tug of war with the poor oto until it flipped loose somehow and fell to the bottom of the tank, where it lay, belly-up. I was convinced it was dead, and apparently so were the angels, who nudged it with their noses for a minute or two before abandoning the toy as no longer interesting. Seconds later, the oto went from "freeze" to "dash" mode and hid behind the heater. Two months later, the same oto is still fat and happy."
"Solo Oto? Oh no! No solo Oto!" Don't keep them solo; they'll "freeze" unhappily under a leaf and pine for reassuring company. A "freezing" Oto may just be resting, or merely too full to feel ambitious. But if there is no other Otocinclus in the vicinity, I think a sole Oto that does an unusual amount of "freezing," is expressing a symptom of unease and tension. It's social stress: "Where is everybody? Why is it so quiet in here? There must be some unseen danger lurking. Better just 'freeze'."

Why newly-arrived Otos can die like flies. Otocinclus are notorious for dying like— well, like Otos—when you first get them home, though once they've acclimated to your planted tanks they live for years. Aquarists beat themselves up over this, but I think it's not our fault. Here's the thing: no vertebrate vegetarian can digest cellulose, not one! so each carries a species-specific community of anaerobic bacteria (and some protozoans) that do the work. Ruminants even have a special fore-stomach (the rumen) where grass is fermented in a rich bacterial soup, protected from stomach acids. Dairy cows are nourished, not so much by grass, but by bacterial by-products, which include some vitamins, and by digesting some bacteria (how ungrateful!). Now, look at the size of the Oto. Scarcely room for a billion gut bacteria in there to do the work, eh? Starved Otos in transit can lose so much of their gut bacteria that the internal ecosystem doesn't revive— even with a glut of tasty algae in your tank! It just passes through their system, like when you were too hasty eating that corn-on-the-cob, remember? Not much nutrition when the kernels passed right through, because your system couldn't digest them open. Otos need a jungley tank with lots of leaf surfaces to run over. But the vegetable supplement we give them (zucchini, spinach, etc.) isn't just a treat. It has to be constant, or else they won't have the gut bacteria to process the green treat when it finally does arrive. Hopefully with your algae, and plenty of natural green cover, and your constant feedings of spirulina flakes or algae wafers plus veggies every few days, Otos that aren't too far gone should thrive with you. Females are noticeably wider and plump, but though a healthy male is leaner, he shouldn't have a concave look, when seen from the side.

SegaDojo recently offered the suggestion that Otos might be unusually sensitive to nitrate. That might go far to explain Otos' sensitivity. "As a rule," G. Sterba wrote in 1967 (in Aquarium Care, p. 257) "newly imported wild-caught fish from tropical waters poor in nitrate and nitrite are particularly sensitive."

Breeding. Commercial Otos are still all wild-caught, I believe. Spawning Otos in aquaria is unusual enough to draw attention.

Alec in Ontario had Otocinclus spawning for him in 1999, "although they have not bred in a few months. For a while they were spawning every three weeks or so. My females are about 30-40% larger than the males, at least in the species that I have. There are also subtle structural differences, and the females usually have an extruding vent. I have two females and three males, but they do not pair off. It's basically the female and whatever male manages to fend off the others and get to her first. During the entire spawn, her eggs are usually fertilized at least once by each male. She will go along from leaf to leaf until she finds one she likes. Meanwhile, the males are all jostling along behind her. They will run their mouths along her entire body and position themselves as close as they can to her. When she finds a suitable leaf, she zips underneath it, and the lucky male wraps his body around her snout and holds her in place while she deposits single eggs on the underside of the leaf."

"They consistently produced fry, but I was never able to raise any, and by the time I set up a dedicated fry tank, they had stopped spawning. I am hoping they will resume in the summer again."

Chuck Huffine gave a detailed account of his spawning O. affinis to the Aquatic-Plants Digest. The spawning pair were in a densely-planted 20 gal. without the distractions of other kinds of fish (an important point), though Huffine senses that communal spawning might be more successful. "Oto's seem to be quite territorial despite their small size, and I suspect this fact may be one of the secrets in spawning them, along with water quality and diet. The Otos I keep in community tanks have not spawned, nor have they exhibited spawning behavior to my knowledge despite similar tank conditions. The pair that do spawn live alone with the exception of shrimp," Huffine noted. Weekly water changes with cooler water seemed to encourage spawning behavior. The eggs were carefully placed on a single plant of Bacopa caroliniana and were guarded, a characteristic Loricariid touch. Follow the hyperlink for more interesting detail.


"Attack" Otos. I've never had a "problem" Otocinclus that developed a habit of rasping the body slime off other fishes, but I hear some individuals develop a taste for it. My hunch is that Otos are more inclined to snuffle at the flanks of other fishes in rather sterile environments, when the only available substiture for algae is a Hikari wafer. More natural grazing grounds are spread over all the surfaces of the aquarium. When Heinz Bremer and Ulrich Walter examined the nutrition of discus fry, which graze on their parents' slime and on specialized nutritious cells shed intact into the mucus, they found microorganisms, especially diatoms and bacteria, settled in the mucus surface. So the bizarre Oto habit isn't incomprehensible. I think it's mildly aggressive behavior, too; I've seen an Oto that had been repeatedly pestered by another fish, turn on the harasser finally and do some defensive mouthing that was modestly aggressive.

Otocinclus on the web. Robyn Rhudy's Otocinclus page has basic details and some personal experience. Further links, too. At "Scotcat.com" you'll find an interesting description of breeding the sister genus, Parotocinclus. But the super Parotocinclus article, full of color photos to compare to your own dwarf Lory is in the section "Ingo's catfish of South America" at http://www.planetcatfish.com/icosa/index.htm Another excellent article, "Otocinclus: 'Little Monkeys' in the Planted Aquarium," by Julian Dignall and Dinyar Lalkaka, outlines recent name changes among Otos, describes some of their natural ecotopes and techniques for acclimating them to the aquarium. It's also archived at PlanetCatfish. Bob Fenner's article "The ideal algae-eater? the littlest South American suckermouth catfishes, genus Otocinclus" gives good Oto-keeping (and breeding) tips, from the perspective of the importer/wholesaler, with useful points for picking out healthy stock, handling and acclimating them. He ends with a long list of Oto articles in the print media.

Otocinclus cf. affinis. Out of a couple of dozen published species, maybe half a dozen turn up in your LFS from time to time. Compare your mystery Otos first to O. affinis— "Golden Otos," Baensch calls them, and illustrates a very golden one indeed. Whether we have the right species name or not, these are the Otos you see everywhere, and the ones most commonly spawned. They come from southeast Brazil, the area round Rio de Janiero. The specific name is currently a little questionable. Not for us to fret about, though. That "cf." in the name above means "comparable to." It's a cop-out that makes me look less clueless than I am and more like I have some serious scientific reservations about the name I'm using.

O. cf. flexilis. From Rio Grande do Sul, in southernmost Brazil. In this Oto, the black lateral band breaks into blotches towards the tail.

O. cf. vittatus. To about 1.5in. This Oto is from the Mato Grosso of Brazil, and small tributaries in the Paraguay drainage. I have a trio, sold to me as "Giant" Otos! (snicker) Indeed they are slightly bigger than the most familiar Oto, O. affinis. Mine correspond very closely with the photos at "Planetcatfish" where O. vittatus was Catfish of the Month for Dec 1996. Paul Kjaerland had some unexpected luck when a small group began laying eggs for him one summer, at a temperature of 25oC and a pH of 7.5, and he got some juveniles out of the resulting fry. Of course you wouldn't keep these or any Otos except in a well-planted tank with a tendancy to grow algae, in peace-loving company, and in water that was soft to moderately soft. Mine get a continual supply of blanched vegetables, a little at a time, and no more till they've finished what they've got. But I don't pull out the spinach leaf after 24 hours; they like it best when it's slimy olive-gray and coming apart. Then they have to forage for algae for 24 hours before they get veggies again. Even the male is mildly plump on this regimen, but I can recognize the female by her broader beam.
 
zoomed.com
hikariusa.com
aqaimports.com
Store