Comments on: New Armored Wood-Eating Catfish Discovered

By: Dr Kaco

Dr Kaco — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:18:29 +0000

red_pill_junkie you are spot on!!! LOL it’s like a “plecos” on Steroids!
Gotta put an asterisk for this find ;p

By: Weezy

Weezy — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:40:25 +0000

In a word, awesome. I love weird or interesting looking fish, and this thing is weird, interesting and cool looking all at the same time.

By: Sordes

Sordes — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:59:49 +0000

Panaques are really quite bizarre catfish, and some of the species can reach really quite impressive sizes. I only wanted to note, that this fish are not really wood-eating. It is well known that this fish scratch on wood, and in general they need actually wood if you want to keep them for longer time in a tank. But they are not really consuming the wood like the larvae of bark beetles. Experiments have shown that loricariids actually lose weight when they get nothing else than wood to eat, and they are poor to digest wood. So even if they often seem to feed on wood, the label “wood-eating” is somewhat misleading. If they would actually eat the wood, they would probably destroy all wooden pieces in a tank within a comparably short time, but that’s normally not the case.
Source:
Inside the guts of wood-eating catfishes: can they digest wood?
Donovan P. German

By: Harold

Harold — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:10:25 +0000

Great. Termites, carpenter ants…now I have to worry about Amazonian catfish doing structural damage to my house?

By: red_pill_junkie

red_pill_junkie — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:56:52 +0000

That looks like a “plecos” (plecostomus), a species most fresh-water aquarium enthusiasts are familiar with —probably the only fish that was able to thrive back when I kept a tank

By: E

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:00:17 +0000

Now THAT’s a fine looking fish =)