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when browsing at an LFS, I noticed several fish labbeled only as "louhan". Anyone have an idea aa to what these are?
A poster in the shop showed a fish similar in shape to some cichlids. Here are some pic links of them:

www.user.cbn.net.id/tiram/My%20Web2/ikan_hoki7.jpg
www.nipponkoifarm.com/o5.jpg
http://o-fish.com/FlowerHorn/ragam_1.php

It appears "Louhans" are just another name for those grotesque Flowerhorns plaguing the hobby. I personally would not give my business to a store that sells Flowerhorns.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

the one they had in the shop looked more like a catfish, a bright orange 12cm catfish

"the one they had in the shop looked more like a catfish..."

But you said they looked like cichlids. I did a quick web search and couldn't find any references to a "Louhan" catfish, so I assume it's just another name for the Flowerhorns. If it really is a catfish, it being bright orange means that it is probably dyed. Either way, that's bad practice.

"I personally would not give my business to a store that sells Flowerhorns."

You would hate the store where I work. The owner has ordered flowerhorns, jellybean parrots, various shipments of dyed fish, and repeatedly orders stuff that will die before it has a chance to be sold. I can't stand working there now, even though I thought the place was cool before I was hired. So naive.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

The owner has ordered flowerhorns, jellybean parrots, various shipments of dyed fish, and repeatedly orders stuff that will die before it has a chance to be sold.

Sounds like the owner of the store where I worked. He lived in Texas, but came to visit the store a couple times a year. He doesn't really know much about fish and only cares about the money. One time he when he was in town ordered a huge shipment of dyed Parrotfish, "fruit" tetras, and one of those big gouramis with the pink spots.

When I saw the fish that came in, I went and bitched at him about how unethical it was and how it was going to harm the store's repuation (we were pretty much the only the only store in the region that didn't sell dyed fish). He couldn't really do anything to me, because I knew the most about fish there and I had dozens of customers that came in every week to seek help and advice specifically from me. Also, the manager and the assistant manager of the store sided with me in this issue.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

Nice that you had that going for you. I'm still cannon fodder- the managers launch me at customers and work that they don't want to take care of themselves. And unfortunately the ownership consists of a family of four, three of which are idiots and gang up on me. The other guy is never here any more. I need to go get a job at the local aquarium.

Sorry, done with the thread thievery.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

Flowerhorns - gorgeous fish.
Would love to own one or two or a dozen here.
Same with Parrot cichlids, I love em both.

If it looked like a Catfish, it certainly cant
also look like a cichlid.

As for it being dyed if its bright orange, thats not
always true. Several catfish are orangey/have orange
coloring - the Orange Lazer Cory comes to mind instantly,
as does my Imitator cat, whos base coloring could only be called "orange".


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To be fair, I did say "probably". And I wouldn't call Brachyrhamdia imitator a bright orange catfish. They are nothing near the color that neon orange dye gives a fish.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

Oops, I found this thread late.

The correct term is actually Luo Han. That's the name that has been given to several hybrid Flowerhorns. However, a Luo Han is different from a 'conventional' Flowerhorn in that it's bred with certain very specific aims in mind. The aim of the commercial breeding facility in producing a true 'Luo Han' is to produce a fish whose side markings resemble certain auspicious Chinese Kanji characters. These fishes used to command a ridiculously high price and were sold as 'Feng Shui' fishes to those that didn't know any better.

The trouble is, of course, that nature has a habit of biting people back hard if they mess about in this fashion. Consequently, for every successful Luo Han that makes it to adulthood and sale, there are literally hundreds of rejects, many of which are the genetic equivalent of a 'cut and shut' car. For those who haven't encountered this term in the world of car sales, a 'cut and shut' car is one that is pieced together from two separate insurance write-offs, the front of one being welded to the back of another. Needless to say, this practice is illegal here in the UK, because the resulting cars are death traps. Trouble is, many of the 'failed' siblings of a Luo Han (as, indeed is the Luo Han itself) is a genetic 'cut and shut' job - an attempt to bolt half the genes of one fish onto half the genes of a fish from another species. Many of the 'failed' siblings are discarded because quite a few of them bear some gross teratological anomalies (in other words, they're deformed). Even though there are severe financial penalties for dumping these failures in local watercourses in Singapore (and indeed, egregious violators can find themselves enjoying the less than salubrious hospitality of a Singapore prison) the practice still continues.

Indeed, when the bottom fell out of the market a couple of years back, some commercial breeders were leaving the fishes in jars on people's doorsteps hoping that the occupants would take them in and look after them, rather like abandoned babies. All in all, the picture surrounding the poor old Luo Han, who didn't ask to be created in this fashion, is a very sorry one indeed - genetically aberrant fishes that are e to disease (including in all probability a host of 'mystery' ailments whose origin is directly genetic, alongside the opportunistic infections that take hold in a weakened fish with a trashed immune system) and in some cases even the so-called 'successes' are grossly ugly in appearance. Some of the descendants of the 'failures' that have been tossed into local watercourses are now ticking away like an ecological time bomb where they have been dumped, though this is offset to some extent by the fact that some of the poorest local people catch these things for food where they have been dumped - though personally I dread to think what long term complications are going to arise in the people that eat these fishes, because they've probably been subject to medication at least once before being dumped, using medications that are NOT scientifically approved for use in food fishes. There are reasons why veterinarians spend up to seven years in training, one being learning which medications are safe to use in food animals and which are not, because of propagation effects up the food chain. A nice hard lesson that was learned here in the UK when we had to slaughter large numbers of cattle due to BSE, as a result of corner-cutting and shoddy methodology overtaking the previous sound practices that were developed with a lot of hard intellectual effort. Perhaps if vets and people with respectable scientific credentials had been listened to, BSE wouldn't have happened, but that's a rant for another thread (and probably another Board for that matter). Needless to say, in the wake of the BSE affair, I shudder to think what unpleasant surprises are lurking in discarded 'failures' fom Luo Han breeding projects that will arise in the people who are unfortunate enough to eat them. After all, before BSE loomed large on the horizon, I suspect only a few specialists studying the nature of the class of diseases to which BSE belongs were aware of the possibility of a species barrier jump - for all we know, there could be something similar turning up in these discarded fishes in years to come.

If anyone wishes to see a particularly grotesque example of a Luo Han, page 53 of the February, 2004 edition of Today's Fishkeeper magazine (published in the UK) has a photo.

[Edited for typos]

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

The one which looked like a catfish qwas the one in the LFS.
The ones looking like cichlids are the ones i found on google images

A Catfish called a Luo Han???

Hmm, methinks I'll have to go and seek this one out ... never heard of a Catfish called that before ... got a reasonably in-depth description? Or better still, a photo?

Check out [link=http://www.planetcatfish.com/]the Planet Catfish website[/link], see if you can find amongst the Families a basic template that roughly matches your fish, then search within that Family. So, for example, if the fish has bony scutes, you'll be looking principally at the Callichtyidae (the Family to which the Corys belong), the Loricariidae (Plecs and allies) and the Doradidae (Talking Catfishes). If the fish is a naked Catfish (no scutes - no Catfish ever has scales, by the way) then you've rather a lot of Families to trawl through - about 34 of them!

Even so, most of the familiar Catfishes can be placed with some certainty within a Family, though if your Catfish has a body morphology that looks like a member of the Bagridae or the Pimelodidae (these, incidentally, are two Families that are so similar you have to dissect them to tell them apart if you don't know the geographical origin of the fish!) then you have more fun and games awaiting you because some fishes that were previously in those two Families have been moved to new Families.

Key features to check out include:

[1] Barbel counts

[2] Whether the barbels are short or long

[3] Whether the barbels are 'feathered'

[4] Presence/absence of adipose fin, and its size relative to the dorsal fin if present

[5] Whether the fish has a sucking disc for a mouth - not all of these are Loricariids, there are some unusual members of the Mochokidae, related to the Synodontis, that have sucking discs belonging to the Genus Chiloglanis ...

[6] Whether the fish has bony scutes, is naked but has scute-like 'ribbing' on the sides (Brachyrhamdia Catfishes sometimes have this) or whether the fish is naked and smooth

That should keep you very busy by the way.





Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Shops that sell flowerhorns usually also sell arowana and saratoga as they both appeal to the same market.

Its possible the fish was mislabelled, or that 2 different species had been sharing the same tank and the one on the label had been sold.

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

callatya,
you are right, a few months ago i saw a big [maybe 1 foot] arowana for sale, for $570!!!!!

What is a saratoga???

"Saratoga", for some reason, is a name given to one of the Australian Arowanas, Scleropages leichhardti. The Gulf Saratoga is Scleropages jardini. These are not listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, unlike the Asian Arowana, Scleropages formosus, which is a CITES Appendix I listed fish.

Scleropages formosus fetches quite ridiculous prices in the Far East, where in several cultures (notably those with historical Chinese influence) the fish is considered auspicious because it resembles a dragon in appearance (hence the name Dragon Fish) which, in ancient Chinese mythology, is considered a symbol of towering good luck. Because the fish is CITES I listed, all specimens of formosus offered for sale MUST be captive bred and microchipped, and accompanied by a veritable mountain of documentation stating that the fish is indeed a captive bred fish. Breeding the fish is difficult - it matures slowly, it is a mouthbrooder that reaches a large size before becoming mature enough to breed, and usually requires housing in an outdoor pond to breed (thus far aquarium breeding has not, to my knowledge, been documented for this fish). Consequently, fry fetch something like £500 each on the open market, and a pair of proven breeding adults belonging to the "Super Red" strain will, if they are ever offered for sale, require you to write out a colossal cheque - you could probably buy a Ferrari for less money.

Some Links:

Saratoga (fish) from Wikipedia

Genus scleropages

Asian Arowana

Luo Hans are created and sold for the same reason in the Far East - they are considered 'auspicious'. "Luo Han" is the Chinese term describing the Buddhist concept of Arhat (this word is Sanskrit in origin) and describes a person who has achieved spiritual enlightenment. See this link for more information on Arhat. Because the fishes are associated in the minds of numerous Far East peoples with concepts such as this, they are considered desirable to own, and consequently command, in some cases, ridiculous prices (though not quite as ridiculous as the Asian Arowanas).

You will also find that "Luo Han" applies to other things too, such as this vine and its fruit, which is a powerful natural sweetener 300 times sweeter than sugar, but with very few calories.

There you go.

[Edited for typos]

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002