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Quite a few new Tetra species are appearing in imporations recently, along with one or two that have nowbeen successfully captive bred and are therefore likely to become more readily available. Some of these new species are really beautiful to look at, but there are two problems associated with them. One, being new to the aquarium scene, some are 'unknowns' in terms of readiness to adapt to aquarium life, and two, identification of some of them is a nightmare, as even professional taxonomists find themselves scratching their heads over some of the new species being imported! But, with those caveats in mind, I shall now introduce everyone to some new Tetras, courtesy of Erwin Schraml and his contributions to Today's Fishkeeper magazine.

Peruvian Sapphire Blue - the name alone should be a good selling point for this fish, and any aquarists on this Board who, like me, have a special affection for blue fish species, will gravitate to this readily. The identification of this species is uncertain, having been labelled Acrobrycon ipaniquianus, but this name may not be valid, because the Peruvian Sapphire Blue has a max SL of just 5 cm, while Fishbase cites Acrobrycon ipaniquianus as reaching 10 cm. However, it IS a native of Peru, and therefore should be expected to relish soft, slightly acidic water (which means that if ever it comes my way, it'll live happily in my tap water - yay!). It is reputedly a 'standard' shoaling Characin, though ease of maintenance remains undocumented. However, this is one worth persevering with, particularly among the Characin specialists, as it is a wonderfully iridescent blue fish with a gold head and almost glowing red adipose fin - it also has a glowing red vertical band on the caudal peduncle that resembles a stoplight on some Volvo estate cars!

Boehlkea sp. "Sky Blue" - another small (max SL 5 cm) Tetra that lokos set to make its mark,once the furore over its classification is resolved! Placed temporarily in Boehlkea, this looks set to be revised in very short order because currently, the Genus Boehlkea is monotypic. However, this species, which has a body shape reminiscent of a Cochu's Blue or a [iGlandulocauda inequalis, possesses a wonderful mixture of yellow and sky blue markings, with a remarkable radiant sky blue anal fing seemingly emanating from a turquoise body patch. One good item of news is that this fish is reputed to be MUCH easier to keep than the Cochu's Blue, and is a shoaler into the bargain. Tolerant of a decent spectrum of water conditions, accepting all foods, it looks set to become a winner in the future, provided that aquarists have the courage to pester their dealers for it!

Bryconamericus sp. "Peru" - another Peruvian Tetra species, and again, one with an associated taxonomic nightmare! First of all, Bryconamericus has doubtful status as a Genus, even though 75 fish species were originally placed in it, of which 56 remain after revision. Originating from Iquitos, these are colourful, with the most amazing claret-hued (almost garnet in sunlight) markings in the caudal fin (separated by a dividing black line), and a mixture of brassy yellows, greens and blues all over its body. Care and maintenance details are scant, so this is a somewhat risky species to take on even for the experienced aquarist, but well worth the effort because it really is a blast of colour in the right setting - one for a backdrop of dark green foliage I reckon!

Creagrutus cochui - again, a name hastily applied to a fish that is probably going to end up being called something completely different. Imagine a Tetra version of a female Cherry Barb, only with MUCH more intensre colour (the yellow surrounding the black line is practically acrylic-painted onto this fish!) and with flame-orange forked caudal lobes. An upper Amazonian fish, it is almost certainly in the wrong Genus, has a head that looks like a Hyphessobrycon, but an anal fin that is too short for a member of that Genus, so where it belongs is anyone's guess! The jury is still out on this one taxonomically, and also maintenance wise (details currently few and far between).

Blue Red Peru Tetra - originally from the Rio Nanay, this looks similar to the much-trumpeted "Colombian Blue Red", but with one important difference. Its sides are genuinely blue! Now before everyone tells me that the "Colombian Blue Red" has blue flanks, I beg to differ. I have seen fishes matching the body shape and general description of the "Colombian Blue Red" in local dealers, and sold as "Colombian Blue Reds", BUT ... the bodies were GREEN. This fish (at least in the photo) is manifestly BLUE. So until both the taxonomic mess is sorted out, and the possibility that my local dealers obtained a green population variant of the Colombian Blue Red, let's assume that these are different fishes! However, the good news is that the "Blue Red Peru" is described as easy to acclimatise, easy to feed, and may yield to diligent efforts upon the part of the would-be captive breeder.

Junior Pandurini - another taxonomic nightmare, but one that has apparently been given the 'once over' by the experts in terms of care and maintenance, and is now labelled as almost a beginner's Tetra. Imagine, if you will, a purple version of a Pretty Tetra with fins like a Rosy Tetra, and the resulting artefact will be fairly close in appearance to this fish. Males have VERY strongly coloured fins, and as the fish has a max SL of just 4 cm, it is a community fish par excellence for the smaller aquarium - if you can find it! And, as a new import, expect it to be pricey. As for colouration, the nearest thing I can find to it is a marine Cardinal Fish called Apogon menesemus from the Burgess' Mini-Atlas, at least in body colour, and the combination of striking colour, small size and adaptability should make it a winner!

Apricot Tetra - a medium-sized Tetra (max SL 7 cm), and one which is a bit of an oddity. Again, a native of Peru (for some reason, Peru seems to be exporting lots of weird new Tetras of late, but I'm not complaining!) and the phrase "does exactly what it says on the tin" applies to this fish, in terms of colour at least. It is, predominantly, an apricot shade of orange yellow all over, with a red anal fin, edged with black and white, but this is one for the more spacious aquarium, and for an aquarium with somewhat larger companions, as it is a gluttonous feeder with a large mouth that will probably regard Neons as a snack! These are shoalers that need space, and feeding wise are regarded as "dustbins with fins".

Kitty Tetra - at last, one with a proper taxonomic identity! Classified in 1994 by Costa & Gery as Hyphessobrycon loweae, the Kitty Tetra actually looks to some extent like a yellow version of the Diamond Tetra (at least in the photos sitting in front of me as I type this!), with the same red eyes as a Lemon Tetra, and is sexually dimorphic. Females are but apale shadow of the impressive males, with their golden livery, and gold fins edged in what seems to be luminous lipstick pink, almost as if painted on by hand, yet thankfully a product of Mother Nature and DNA, not the dread hand of the fish dyer! Females have much shorter fins than the males, and a green abdomen to boot, so telling them apart should be easy even for the novice. And now, the even better news for those licking their lips at the prospect of owning Kitty Tetras - not only are they relatively tolerant of a wide water chemistry spectrum, most of the European stock at least is now tank-bred and therefore even easier to acclimatise. Likely to look utterly gorgeous against a backdrop of dark green foliage, and will probably become even more brilliant on the infamous Calilasseia Lemon Tetra conditioning diet of live foods four times per week interspersed with colour flakes ...

Nannostomus marginatus "Purple" - once again, a Peruvian import, and anyone who sees the photo before me will be astonished. Imagine a tiny Pencil Fish (just 4 cm SL), that is effectively a little underwater shooting star of brilliant scarlet. I'm not kidding! How it came to be called "Purple" is beyond me - there is some purple on it, but the first thing that hits the eyes upon seeing this fish is that blast of scarlet, so intense that it threatens to fry your retina! No doubt someone reading this will be saying "Aha! It's a Red Arc Pencilfish!" But Red Arcs are not, as far as I am aware, part of the marginatus group of Pencils. Unless I've got my wires crossed somewhere of course. Plus, Red Arcs are iridescently red like Glowlight Tetras, while this fish is another of those acrylic-airbrushed species that looks as if God reached for the wrong spray gun and gave this fish a marine coral reef paint job. Which is a pretty good way of describing this fish, actually, as it looks like some of the marine Cardinal Fishes but for the single dorsal fin, and if anything has an even more intense red than most of these: in fact, the nearest fish I can find that matches this for nuclear-intensity bomb-blast scarlet is a marine Soldierfish called Sargocentron tieroides, again from the Burgess' Mini-Atlas. This fish is probably one of the most intensely red objects on the entire planet, and now it has a freshwater rival in this tiny Pencil Fish -believe me, you'll need a welding visor to look at this new Pencil Fish for any length of time, its colour is that seraringly intense! The bad news? No-one has successfully bred it in captivity yet, so we're reliant on imports. And that combination of colour, rarity and sky-high desirability among Pencil Fish specialists means that its price will likewise be sky high.

Another Baedecker Fish Tour over, it's now back to watching my Pandas spawning



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

YUM YUM! I want! Your tasty words described them very well but I think we'd all agree that a picture is a worth a thousand words(*Hint*Hint)!

Give me some time & I'll try and scan them. Better still MkCube, if you can E-Mail me, I'll mail the scans to you, and let you have the fun of finding a host for them

This isn't because I'm lazy, it's because my own photo album has 350-odd photos in there, and providing links is an interesting exercise in manipulating the character set

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Possible Web shots of some of these critters:

(1) Peruvian Sapphire Blue (which, according to the caption, IS "Acrobrycon ipaniquianus": http://www.aquanet.de/beitraege/Fachbeitrag.20040203152905785.asp

(2) Blue-Red Peru Tetra: http://www.geocities.com/mikefjacobs/redfintet.jpg

(3) Junior Pandurini (this one I've nailed down solidly): http://www.geocities.com/mikefjacobs/Junior.jpg

(4) Apricot Tetra -- maybe (although I have doubts about this one): http://www.geocities.com/mikefjacobs/LimonW.jpg

(5) Kitty Tetra (another one I've nailed down solidly):
http://www.rva.ne.jp/gallery/htm_carasin/k_t.htm
http://www.rva.ne.jp/gallary3/characin/hy_loweae_super.htm
http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.cfm?ID=46320

(6) Nannostomus marginatus "Purple" (probably -- at any rate, it's definitely not N. morganthaleri):
http://my.so-net.net.tw/bigrice/new_page_40.htm
http://www.rva.ne.jp/gallary3/characin/nannostomu_sp.htm
http://www.geocities.com/mikefjacobs/redcoral2.jpg

I have scans!

MkCube, if you want them, I can mail them to you. PM me for my E-Mail address & I'll send them by return mail.

Oops, almost forgot ...

I've taken a look at the "New Tetra" photos (scans of which will make their way to MkCube if his E-Mail account can hold 7 megs worth of huge JPEG files!) and dug out the old Innes book to see if this can shed some light on one or two of the mysteries.

First of all, the so-called "Creagrutus cochui". The venerable Innes book features Creagrutus beni in its pages, and this fish has a down-turned mouth, which bears a somewhat quixotic resemblance to that of the False Cleaner Blennies of the Genera Plagiotremus nd Aspidontus (to which it isn't even distantly related!). The so-called "Creagrutus cochui" has an upturned mouth, so like Erwin Schraml, I doubt it belongs in that Genus. Two more likely possibilities for relations are Gephyrocharax atracaudatus and Glandulocauda inequalis, with Mimagoniates microlepis being another possible close relative.

The "Blue Red Peru" is probably NOT the Colombian Tetra, Hyphessobrycon columbianus, because an illustration of that fish appears in one of my other magazines, and not only has less intense colour in the fins, but a deeper body. The closest body shape I can find that resembles the "Blue Red Peru" is that of the Buenos Aires Tetra, Hemigrammus caudovittatus, which has a bad reputation in some quarters for fin-nipping, so it might be advisable not to keep the "BlueRed Peru" with long-finned fishes in case it shares the Buenos Aires Tetra's bad habits.

The "Junior Pandurini" looks like a Hyphessobrycon, indeed seems to share a kinship in body shape terms at least with the Lemon Tetra. It also looks somewhat (to confuse the picture further) like the Head And Tail Light Tetra, Hemigrammus ocellifer, in body shape (but then, a number of Hyphessobrycon and Hemigrammus species look as if they ought to belong to a single Genus!)

Apricot Tetras remain a mystery. Someone apparetnly suggested that they might belong in P{seudochalceus, but Schraml dismisses that because Pseudochalceus contains five very well-defined species, and this fish doesn't fit with those. It certainly does NOT fit in with Chalceus, which is a torpedo shaped affair, and the nearest I can find that even remotely resembles the Apricot Tetra is a rarity called Crenuchus spilurus.

As for "Bryconamericus sp. Peru", it actually bears some morphological relation to the supposedly unrelated Hyphessobrycon scholzei, but I doubt that it belongs in Hyphessobrycon, and again, a comparison with Gephyrocharax is tempting.

The Peruvian Sapphire Blue is too slender in shape to warrant comparison with the oddities in Gephyrocharax, Glandulocauda and Mimagoniates, but actually invites some comparison with the spindly Swordtail Characin, Croynopoma riisei, except of course that it doesn't possess the outlandish finnage and gill plate appendages of the latter.

So, the mysteries remain in some cases. At some point I'll have to take a look at Inpaichthys and see if there's a resemblance between members of that Genus and any of these newcomers - this too may prove instructive. No doubt this little lot will help to keep taxomomic revisionists such as Kullander in gainful employment for a good decade or so to come, although he should have enough on his plate with the reclassification of the Mesoamerican Cichlids! Unless of course, Parachromis and related Genera were all his work ...

Oh, and apparently, if there is anyone on this Board who seeks a career with secure long-term prospects, then Characoid taxonomy is one such field. There remains a LOT of work to be done in this field, and so, anyone out there who fancies a career that may not be marvellously well paid, but which could include lots of foreign travel, interspersed with time spent in museum labs dissecting small fishes, could do a lot worse than become a specialist in Characoid taxonomy. Be prepared, however, for "turf wars" with rivals, and lots of mud-slinging in the specialist journals along the lines of "this latest naming suggestion I deem invalid on phylogenetic grounds, plus the underlying cladistics is fundamentally flawed with respect to the suprageneric placement" ... which, in taxonomic circles, is equivalent to saying that your mother wears army boots



[span class="edited"][Edited by Calilasseia 2004-07-30 08:26][/span]

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

When you say that about my cladistics, SMILE.

Your Mailbox is full, Cali.

Not any more MkCube

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Sorry to double post, but now I've mailed the pics to MkCube, perhaps a little jogging from the other Tetra fans will persuade him to link to them

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

"Southern Apistos" (which, according to one other contributor to this site, has a good record in airmailing fish) has just gotten a new shipment from Peru:
http://www.geocities.com/mikefjacobs/pricelist.html

...which includes the "Rio Nanay Boehlkea" -- a close cousin of Cochu's Blue but with a blazing red adipose fin, which I've seen on several sites:
http://www.geocities.com/mikefjacobs/redadipose2W.jpg

...and some more "Morado Tetras" (which I've seen on one other site, although that photo didn't make them look quite as brilliant):
http://www.geocities.com/mikefjacobs/moradoWEB.jpg

You might also take a look at some of his lovely dwarf cichlids and catfish. (And he also claims to have some
"Coral Red Nannostomus" -- that is, Red Arc Pencilfish -- left.)

DURGH I'm very computer-disoriented so can someone teach me how to link to the pics?

Well, I'M computer-disoriented too, MKCube. Just go to the first URL I listed, and then click on the appropriate "xxx" links in the "Pictures" column of the fish charts. (Lots of very purty fish pictures on this site.)

Lol If I linked to the pictures by supplying the exact address would people be able to steal into my account?