Help with ID of Hypostomus sp?

[Sciencehero]

I went through part of the Loricariidae list, I think this guy is part of the Hypostomus genus, but I'm not 100% sure. Any help would be appreciated. Apologies for the not completely clean glass/flash reflections.

[MatsP]

Definitely

Hypostomus

, but I'm certainly not skilled enough to say which species it is - there are quite a few - and they are pretty much "the same" anyways.

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Mats

[Shane]

This is

Hypostomus plecostomus

They still show up from time to time as bycatch in shipments from Colombia.
-Shane

[Carp37]

I'd almost forgotten how pretty Hypostomus are. It's a shame they no longer breed these in SE Asia.

[MatsP]

It's a shame they no longer breed these in SE Asia.

I thought they were all wild-caught [I'm by no means saying you are wrong - just that my impression was that they were never bred comercially!]

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Mats

[Carp37]

Hi Mats- I remember seeing photos of plecs from fish farms in South East Asia in magazines dating from the early 1980s- they apparently basically just put large numbers of wild-caught fish in muddy, rectangular ponds, and netted the ponds after a period of time to remove juveniles for sale. At that time, nearly all non-gibbiceps "commons" sold in the UK were Hypostomus- Pterygoplichthys pardalis was a rare contaminant in those days. Somewhere in the early 1990s the balance shifted to most of the fish coming in being Pterygoplichthys, and Hypostomus seem to be a relatively uncommon import nowadays. I don't konw if they got out-competed in the breeding/raising ponds, or if there was a conscious shift towards (possibly more fecund) Pterygoplichthys. I believe the US still got largely wild-caught fish during this time, before fish farms in Florida took over, but could be wrong on that.

[MatsP]

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe the young fish that I bought in the early/mid 1980's was P. pardalis [not that I would have actually known the difference - at the time, I thought Loricariidae consisted of three genera which had a single species each, and since the fish didn't look like Farlowella or Sturisoma, they would have been Plecostomus by process of elimination - the book about Aquarium fish that I had only had these three, and I had not even considered that there could be more of them...

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Mats

[Carp37]

There may have been some pardalis in the UK as contaminants back then, but mine definitely had the shorter dorsal and fewer rays (about 7 soft rays???) characteristic of Hypostomus (or at least excluding Pterygos). Hypostomus had the distinct advantage of typically staying somewhat smaller than Pterygos. The first pardalis I saw was in the mid-90s, although I'd stopped running fishtanks after 1992. Gibbys did start appearing in the mid to late 80s.