What on earth did I just purchase...

MC · Post by MC » 24 Jan 2004, 03:38

Any help is very much appreciated.

Type 1 -
http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02637.JPG

Type 2 -

http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02638.JPG

http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02639.JPG

Post by **Dinyar** » 24 Jan 2004, 05:39

My first guess was , but in fact, your fish is a stressed out .

Dinyar

MC · Post by MC » 24 Jan 2004, 06:01

I just took some more pictures, of them in the water

http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02658.JPG

http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02659.JPG
http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02660.JPG

Oh well what a shame, I was hoping at least one of them might be njassae, I think you can guess which one I was thinking of from the the two of them.

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 24 Jan 2004, 07:19

This is a very wide spread problem, it happens over here too, most of the time.

I cannot say where's the blaim or if any, but usually fish sold as Synodontis njassee aren't S njassee at all!!
I've seen nigrita's (even here in the cat-elog! before true njassee-pix became available), robbianus, ocellifer (both small spot and large spot variety) and even multipunctatus and the odd petricola both labelled and sold as Synodontis njassee.

It's either misidentification by importers/exporters/wholesalers/LFS or the same just making a fast buck out of a "cheap/easy to get" riverine Syno sold as "the real thing" to all the Malawi-fishkeepers; of wich there are many......

A few weeks back I was in Germany (usually German fishkeepers and LFS are quite on top of everything) and there were 4 tanks spread through the store with fish labelled as njassee.

Only 1 actually held them; those were labelled "wildcaught njassee".....

Post by **Silurus** » 24 Jan 2004, 11:59

Your Type 1 catfish are NOT S. nigrita:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02637.JPG
http://members.iinet.net.au/~cmfp/Catfish/DSC02658.JPG

I am almost certain it is S. obesus. It may not be S. njassae, but it's still a pretty good find nonetheless.

MC · Post by MC » 25 Jan 2004, 05:46

Ok, so I have 1 Synodontis nigrita and 1 Synodontis obesus.

Nigrita there is a bundle of information on.

I am however, scratching around and not finding much information on the obesus other then it gets rather large (37.5cm according to fishbase).

Could one of you please enlighten me on some factual information regarding this monster syno.

Thankyou.

Post by **Silurus** » 29 Jan 2004, 10:07

I just realized that there is some info on this species on Pg. 404 in Vol. 3 of the Mergus Atlas. I'm not sure if the info is accurate, since the fish in the picture certainly isn't S. obesus (interestingly it appears to have a spiky humeral process, but I shall not speculate on what it might be here).