‘Red lizard catfish’
When I first saw these they were described as ‘red lizard loaches’ but they are clearly whiptail catfish and not loaches. I bought a group at auction and am keeping them in an 18″ x 30″ tank with some Panaqolus. I’d heard that they prefer to spawn in tubes that are open on both ends, so I provided a variety of pvc tubes along with the standard closed-on-one-end pleco caves. Food was mostly Spirulina tabs, plus the occasional green bean.
Then I waited a long time — roughly a year and a half. The whiptails grew, and the females got round. I tried isolating a pair in their own tank, but they didn’t snow any interest in spawning.
Spawns finally started when I left them in the care of my brother for a couple of months. He fed them on a more carnivorous diet consisting mostly of ‘Ultra Wafer Vegetable and Shrimp Pie’ which are actually just shrimpy tablets that look a lot like Spirulina tabs.
The first sign of spawning was little twiggy catfish dangling from surface leaves in the tank. I quickly scooped out the fry that I could find, and then started inspecting the tubes. Sure enough, I found a length of 1″ tubing with a nice big pile of eggs in it. I moved the tube (minus the parent) into a smaller box with aeration on one end so that there was a steady current through the tube; the eggs hatched into wrigglers after a few days and the wrigglers eventually started looking like the might be able to eat.
Whiptail fry are famously bad at foraging; I’m told that if they are sitting on food they’ll eat it but that they can starve to death when there’s plenty of food a few inches away. So, I moved the fry into a “german breeding ring” where they would be confined into a small space but still have plenty of fresh water; I filled the ring with partially-decayed leaf litter and provided daily green beans and/or bloodworms.
That system worked pretty well until the aeration accidentally stopped working for the breeding ring, and all the fry died shortly thereafter, possibly for lack of oxygen or maybe just for lack of current.
I’m still keeping quite a few of these fish, but haven’t seen any large spawns since the last, ill-fated egg pile. Most of the initial fish that I scooped out and let loose in a different random fry tank are doing well, but I’m still keeping an eye out for new egg clusters; I’d still like to raise a full-sized spawn of these.
